Abstract
This Insight offers a close reading of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021) in light of contemporary tradwife culture. It argues that the novel channels tradwife sensibility through its aesthetic framework, advocates a solution to contemporary social ills comparable to that put forward by tradwife content, and attributes responsibility for these ills to the same scapegoat. In so doing, the novel misdirects otherwise valid social critique and forecloses more imaginative solutions to the problems of our time. Acknowledging the mixed reception the novel has elicited, this Insight concludes by lamenting the possibility that even the critical outrage it has generated may only serve to underscore the appeal of its central message.
Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? tells the story of two heterosexual couples whose relationships develop in parallel with an email exchange between the novel’s two female protagonists, Alice and Eileen. In these emails, Alice and Eileen articulate their despair at the state of the world, a despair caused not only by their personal struggles with loneliness, professional alienation, and, in Eileen’s case, financial insecurity, but also global threats such as climate change, civilisational collapse, and the perceived decline of aesthetic experience. The primary contention of this Insight is that the novel presents its romantic resolution—whereby the couples end the novel happily cohabiting and, in one case, happily pregnant—as a solution to both sets of problems outlined above.
It may legitimately be asked why the novel’s romantic resolution requires renewed attention at this time. While Rooney can justifiably be described as a cultural phenomenon whose work has sparked extensive debate in both academic circles and popular media, Beautiful World is neither her most recent novel nor her most critically acclaimed. Its closing chapters have been widely critiqued (for example, ; ; ), notably for the way they ‘resolve on conventional heterosexuality as a saving inoculation from structural oppression’ . Not all critics agree, however, that this resolution should be taken at face value, and the message it seemingly conveys has not yet been contextualised within the cultural turn which has seen tradwife ideas, with their similar valorisation of ‘conventional heterosexuality’, come to prominence across the globe in recent years. Such contextualisation helps to illuminate the affective appeal which ‘face-value’ readings of the novel’s resolution may have.
The question of how the novel’s resolution should be read, and of the kind of ideological work it performs, comes into sharper focus when looking at the novel’s formal structure. Divided between Alice and Eileen’s email correspondence, where most of the novel’s social critique is contained, and the third-person narration of their love stories, it is at first tempting to think that the novel keeps its discussion of ‘structural oppression’ neatly separate from its treatment of heterosexual couple formation. Annabel Barry, for example, argues that, ‘sequestered into their own chapter[s], the emails become a convenient labor-saving device, an easy shorthand for what a reader only invested in conventional and “readable” romantic plotlines might skip’ . For Barry, this enables Beautiful World to fulfil the function which Lauren Berlant ascribes to the romance novel, namely, that of providing readers—especially women readers—with ‘relief from the political’. Summarising Berlant’s thesis, Barry claims that, ‘the soothingly predictable generic form of the romantic novel gives women readers the break from oppression they need to keep on going, but at the steep price of vitiating their desire for transformative political change, including the rejection of compulsory heterosexuality and capitalism’ . The implication here seems to be that the rejection of compulsory heterosexuality and capitalism must necessarily coincide, a presupposition that may account for Barry’s claim that Beautiful World’s romantic resolution ‘dissipates’ the critique articulated in the emails. This critique, after all, is often framed in explicitly anti-capitalist terms.
Yet the proliferation of tradwife content in recent years makes clear that a critique of capitalism can, in fact, express itself via the embrace of compulsory heterosexuality; sociologists Sarah Banet-Weiser and Sara Reinis, for example, have observed that the tradwife lifestyle presents itself as a welcome escape from capitalist pressures (; see also and ). This dynamic is also palpable in Alice and Eileen’s emails, whose anti-capitalist polemic is intertwined with an equally explicit lament for the decline of compulsory heterosexuality. Indeed, far from ‘dissipating’ their own critique, the emails can be understood as systematically laying the ideological groundwork for the novel’s romantic resolution, building an argument for this resolution as an answer to the problems the emails thematise.
The mutually reinforcing relationship between the emails and the novel’s romantic resolution is reflected in the final emails, which confirm that the two heterosexual couples do, in fact, end the novel happily cohabiting: it is here that the romantic plotlines are resolved. For Barry, however, the ‘labour saving’ function of the emails makes them a ‘gimmick’ and thus an inherently caricaturing form. This, in turn, means that the sentimental relief which the final emails offer ‘feels flat’, even as it claims to be a resolution. It is on this basis that Barry claims the novel ‘succeeds as critique’ after all: precisely because its romantic resolution ‘affectively fails’. That is, it does not repay readers for their affective investment in the novel’s romantic plotline. The resolution does not ‘feel flat’ to all readers, however: not only have some critics celebrated the ‘note of hope’ on which the novel ends , there is a case to be made—again drawing on Banet-Weiser and Reinis’s analysis of tradwife content—that even the more negative emotional responses the ending has elicited in some quarters may only serve to underline its affective appeal in others.
Before making this case, it is worth examining the argument constructed by the emails themselves. Where Barry claims that the final emails ‘resolve upon conventional heterosexuality as a saving inoculation from structural oppression’, it may be more accurate to say that, taken as a whole, the emails present ‘conventional heterosexuality’ as capable of rendering the world less oppressive in the first place . This argument is introduced subtly. The first email, written by Alice, recounts the horror she experiences in her local convenience shop, prompted by the realisation that ‘all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations’ (27) have culminated only in the options she sees before her, namely, ‘all the various brands of soft drinks in plastic bottles and all the pre-packaged lunch deals and confectionery in sealed bags and store-baked pastries’ (27). This framing implies that the problem is not primarily the back-breaking work and burning of fossil-fuels itself, so much as the fact that this is ‘all so that I could choose from various lunch options, each packaged in multiple layers of single-use plastic’ (27). The focus on brands and packaging, meanwhile, signals that what is objectionable about the end result of the processes described is their aesthetic effect. Alice may lament the suffering involved, but what she longs for is the more ‘beautiful world’ invoked by the novel’s title. As will become evident, that world is strongly implied to be a more heterosexual one.
It should be acknowledged that Alice’s longing could, at this point, be read as the luxury concern of the text’s most privileged character, at least in economic terms; Alice may not yet have been revealed as a millionaire, but the cosmopolitan lifestyle she describes in the novel’s opening chapter implies substantial wealth. The desire for a more ‘beautiful world’ is not, however, exclusive to Alice: it is also shared by Eileen. Furthermore, both characters draw on a remarkably similar visual grammar to express this desire. For example, a subsequent email from Eileen includes the following passage:
My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence. You can actually see the change in process if you look at street photography from before and after 1976. I know we have good reason to be sceptical of aesthetic nostalgia, but the fact remains that before the 1970s, people wore durable clothes of wool and cotton, stored drinks in glass bottles, wrapped food produce in paper, and filled their houses with sturdy wooden furniture. (76)
The continued emphasis on plastic as the defining material of modern ugliness means that the alternative aesthetic Eileen describes, defined by its alternative materials, feels like the natural answer to both her own and Alice’s complaints. Where Eileen’s perspective might be expected to offer a counterpoint to Alice’s, then, especially given the back-and-forth structure of their email exchange, that structure in fact allows their observations to build on each other, creating a shared impression of the world they inhabit, and of the alternative they long for. What is perhaps most revealing about this passage, however, is not what it describes, but what it omits.
Eileen does not pause, as Alice does, to consider the relations of production underlying the aesthetic she invokes. She, like Rooney herself (see, for example, ), identifies as a Marxist (102), yet she does not ask who made the durable clothes of wool and cotton, or stored the drinks in glass bottles and wrapped the food in paper, much less who prepared the food and drink such that it could be stored in this way to begin with. She also does not ask who built the sturdy wooden furniture. Once these questions are taken into account, however, it becomes evident that the ‘beautiful world’ being lamented in this passage is a world rendered beautiful by its specific forms, not only of hand labour, but of gendered labour. It is the world, that is, explicitly mourned by tradwives, where ‘supposedly men were men, women were women, and they existed in dyads of harmony and bliss’ . It does not take long for the gendered aspect of Alice and Eileen’s longing to be made similarly explicit.
At first, then, the fact that Eileen laments the ugliness of the modern world while lamenting her own loneliness within it, as she does in the same email (73–74), is presented as incidental. That loneliness, however, which she and Alice share, is very much associated with their living arrangements, and the appropriate alternative to those arrangements is quickly articulated. As Alice writes in her reply to Eileen:
People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see. Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life […] I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing. (186–187)
Critic Sarah Brouillette has already drawn attention to ‘all the other possibilities just beyond the work’s field of vision’ which are disavowed in lines like these . What makes such lines particularly striking when ascribed to Alice, however, is that Alice is putatively bisexual (92). This creates a conspicuous gap where her queer perspective fails to provide her with a compelling alternative vision for her world. This gap is then filled with the very nostalgia she claims to disavow. Again, the visual grammar she uses to express this nostalgia is echoed by Eileen.
The imagery conjured by Alice’s phrase, ‘sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life’ blends seamlessly with that invoked by Eileen’s description, in her subsequent email, of the ‘lurid ugliness’ of modern life. This is a world in which, among other things, ‘the air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals’ (207–208). Not only does this formulation once again closely resemble tradwife discourse, which frequently uses analogous concerns about food safety to argue for a division of labour that restricts women’s work to the domestic sphere ; it also stands in stark contrast to the description Eileen shares, in the same email, of what a happy life might look like:
The picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child—a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for? (212–213)
What is most telling, however, is Eileen’s claim that this picture seems so far beyond her as to be ‘like a dream, completely unrelated to anything in reality’ (213). The reason for this appears to lie in her faltering relationship with Simon, her childhood sweetheart (213). Without this love affair and the implicit prospect of a traditional marriage, she is no more able than Alice to imagine a life that might be verdant and beautiful, rather than sterile and sad. For that matter, she is not even able to imagine a verdant, beautiful death.
It may not be immediately obvious why this should be. To equate being single at thirty and living with flatmates with ‘foreclosure on the possibility of life’ initially seems a drastic interpretative leap. However, the clue to how both Alice and Eileen come to make this leap, albeit implicitly in Eileen’s case, is provided by the adjective ‘sterile’. The underlying assumption is that those who participate in this lifestyle do not participate in what queer theorist Lee Edelman has termed ‘reproductive futurism’ . Not only do they not get married or conduct love affairs, theydo not have children, and in Edelman’s words:
If there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself. (12–13)
Alice evidently does not join Edelman in his exhortation to embrace this meaninglessness—‘replete, paradoxically, with jouissance’ (22)—from a queer perspective. Rather, what is intriguing about reading Beautiful World in light of Edelman’s argument is that Alice appears to identify the same source of blame as Edelman for what she perceives to be the social ills attendant upon the decline of coercive heterosexual monogamy. Furthermore, she appears to identify with this blame: ‘When we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it?’ she asks (186, my emphasis). Eileen, by contrast, is cast as more of a passive victim, bewildered by how and why the happy future she always imagined for herself should have eluded her. Taken together, this framing creates the impression that Eileen has been deprived of the life that would have made her happy (or of the conditions that would have made that life possible) by the actions of a cadre of women—to which Alice once belonged, though she is now repentant—in their struggle for the right to live differently. The implication seems to be that the norm of heterosexual monogamy had to remain coercive for anyone to enjoy it. Still conspicuously absent, for a novel written by a Marxist, is any acknowledgement of how market forces may have shaped the possibilities available not only to Eileen, but to ‘everyone’ of her and Alice’s generation who finds themselves in the same position. In this sense, the novel again echoes much tradwife discourse, which similarly blames feminism, or feminists, for social ills that might better be attributed to what Banet-Weiser and Reinis term ‘capitalist patriarchy’ .
This assignation of blame is reflected not only in the novel’s content, but in its narrative structure. As noted, by the end of the novel, both Alice and Eileen are cohabiting with their male partners. Where Eileen has moved in with Simon, however, Alice’s partner, Felix, has moved in with her. And, where the lifestyle Eileen describes is focused on her and Simon’s domestic activities within the home they now share (336), Alice focuses on her and Felix’s social activities beyond the home, like the dinner parties she misses, or the time Felix spends at their local community garden (326). The most important difference, however, is that Eileen is pregnant, and that she and Simon are therefore planning to buy a house together—again, presumably on his salary, given what we know about hers. She is, in other words, finally on the way to realising the idyll of her childhood dream after all: the dream in which she gets to enjoy her own private garden of domestic bliss. By contrast, Alice, who earlier in the novel expresses bafflement at the idea of anyone wanting to have children ‘in this world’ (59), is in chronic pain, suffering from stress, and struggling to write her next book (328–331). Rather than bringing new life into the world, she is still dedicating herself to the grubby, profit-driven work which makes her enough money to buy her own house (306), but also brings her the celebrity she finds so distressing that it makes her ill (328). Ironically, it is this choice not to have a child, but to try and bring a new book into the world, that leads to the state of physical precarity in which the reader leaves Alice at the end of the novel.
As ironic as this characterisation of the choice may be, it nevertheless clarifies which of the two heroines the text wants readers to view as having taken the better path. Alice’s path functions as its own punishment, whereas Eileen’s constitutes its own reward, hence her concluding line, ‘I’m very happy’ (337). These three words are conspicuously absent from Alice’s final chapter, although Alice does describe herself as frighteningly, apparently quite anxiety-inducingly lucky (331). This dynamic exemplifies one of the central tenets of tradwife discourse: that the route to genuine fulfilment for women lies in embracing motherhood as sole—or, in Eileen’s case, primary—vocation, while the prioritisation of professional achievement leads only to burnout and alienation . Eileen, however, appears to feel compelled to justify her choice: she writes that she wants ‘to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care’ (337). Yet as Sadie Graham observes, ‘Who out there is railing against heterosexual love and care, against the ordinariness of baby-making and marriage? The feminists? The lesbians?’ . Eileen poses the same question when she asks: ‘To prove it to whom, I wonder’ (337). Her tentative answer is ‘myself, maybe’ (337). Yet the person she is addressing is Alice. It is to Alice that she feels obliged to append a caveat to her closing line: ‘I know that it’s not the life you imagined for me […] but it’s the life I have, the only one’ (337). Despite the fact that her present circumstances reflect in fact precisely the kind of life Alice advocated earlier in the novel, this moment reads as though Eileen were finally releasing herself from Alice’s sway. The ending meted out to Alice can thus be understood as a form of punishment, not only for her own choices, but for their purportedly malign influence on her innocent friend and, by extension, the world at large.
This is what renders the novel’s ending particularly disappointing. In the face of all the dystopian challenges the world is facing at large, it may be understandable that the idea of retreating into private utopias at home should be finding widespread resonance, as both the proliferation of tradwife discourse, and the success of Rooney’s novels, would seem to attest. However, ‘the lesbians and the feminists’ are not responsible, either for what has made such retreat more appealing, or what has made it harder to attain. Furthermore, Brouillette points out that, far from providing a ‘bastion against a bleak society’, retreat into such private utopias helps to make society bleak in the first place, because care is then expected, and indeed structured, to take place in the home and not elsewhere. Eileen claims, in language it is difficult not to read as a direct invocation of Edelman, that her pregnancy places her ‘on the side’, not only of her own child but of all mothers and children (334), and pays lip service to the idea that ‘we have to try […] to build a world they can live in’ (333). And yet, it is not clear that she intends to change her own life in any meaningful way to reflect this commitment. Indeed, it is even hinted that she is considering buying a car (334). She further describes herself as so tired she could sink through the floor after completing the routine tasks of her day (335). In contrast, the ending Rooney gives Alice and Felix presents a glimpse of a domestic utopia that appears to serve not only as a refuge from the world, but as a refuge from which they might emerge better equipped to engage with the world, and perhaps even to change it. However, this image is curtailed almost as soon as it comes into view, with the horizon narrowed to fit the confines of ill-health with which Alice is punished for the model of gender relations which underpins her life with Felix, as well as her queer past. The scapegoating of Alice, then, does not only amount to a misdirection of otherwise valid social critique; it represents a missed opportunity to explore more imaginative solutions to the problems of our time than retreat into nostalgic, privatised heterosexual coupledom.
Considered in this light, it is reassuring that critics such as Barry argue against the idea that the novel’s resolution should be taken at face value. It is likewise difficult to believe that a self-proclaimed Marxist such as Rooney would present retreat into the bourgeois family unit as a solution to the kind of problems Beautiful World thematises, or at least that she would do so without irony. This, after all, is precisely what Marxists are usually understood to rebuke literature for doing: providing ideological and imaginary solutions to unresolved sociopolitical contradictions . It is, however, worth noting that Rooney has never claimed to be writing Marxist novels and has even claimed that if a book generates profit for shareholders, ‘then the book cannot meaningfully be critiquing the system by which that profit is turned’ . It may be worth asking whether a book has the potential to shore up the system by which that profit is turned, but perhaps the more salient question is whether the ending really does fail affectively. As previously outlined, some critics have responded positively to the novel’s closing note, and even those critics who have responded more negatively describe the ending as having a powerful emotional impact. Barry, for example, claims that it made all of her friends uncomfortable; it clearly frustrated Brouillette and Graham, and I personally know someone who considered throwing the book into the nearest lake in Berlin upon finishing. Perhaps, then, in a final parallel with tradwife content, the ending can be understood to accomplish a dual purpose: it generates attention and, by creating a poetic contrast between its own placid imagery and the angry responses of those who object to it, heightens the appeal of retreat into the ‘beautiful world’ it promises (see ). In other words, it can be understood as a form of rage-bait—one that, far from failing affectively, may succeed only too well.