Love is a Cannibalistic Frog: Feminist Critique and The Jewish Gothic in Study for Obedience (2023) by Sarah Bernstein

Part I of II. Warning: Contains Spoilers.

“Hostage” by Billie Eilish

(If the embedded video isn’t working, I also hyperlinked it above.)

“I can turn the tables and do as I want.  I can make women stronger.  I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.” ~ Paula Rego, one of the two epigraphs to Study for Obedience

What an English major’s dream Study for Obedience (2023) by Sarah Bernstein is.  It reveals something new each time I open it, and there’s so much to interpret (I think it requires at least two readings in order to attempt an analysis)!  A subtle work of Gothic horror, it is simultaneously sad, shocking, and deliciously creepy.  An unnamed Jewish woman accepts her brother’s invitation to live with him at the historic estate he bought in the country “of our family’s ancestors, an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits” (4).  My idle guess places the events of the book in or near Vitebsk, Belarus. 

Several themes illuminate the text; among them, I want to highlight Bernice Rubens’ proposal for fiction that employs R.D. Laing’s concept of the “elected member” not only to stage family drama but also as a political allegory focused on the scapegoating of the Jews; the concepts of demonic grounds and oppositional geography, as explicated by Katherine McKittrick, which posit geography as a terrain of social struggle; the interrelation between political violence (ethnic genocide, mass murder, terror) and environmental devastation; irony and dissimulation — that is, the protagonist’s unstable and unreliable use of language, which both reveals and conceals the novel’s events; and a spooky Gothic horror vibe reminiscent of the feminist short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which insinuates a sadomasochistically incestuous relationship, traces the female protagonist’s descent into malevolent madness, and hints at her development of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. 

In Part I, I will cover the incest, turned tables of abusive domination, Munchausen by proxy, feminist Gothic critique, and the dissimulating / ironic language, where things are not quite as they seem.  In Part II, I will discuss the “elected member” scapegoat theme, the battle between forces of geographic hegemony and geographic multicultural egalitarianism (or at least horizontalism), a Jewish Gothic critique, and the linkage between political violence and environmental violence. 

Excitingly, the text can be classified as Jewish (Feminist) Gothic; how many books can we say that about?  Ultimately, the protagonist’s supposed cultivation of goodness and disavowal of her will-to-power belie an obsessive desire to possess and overpower her brother, whom she sickens by poisoning in order to hold hostage and bend to her desires.  While not explicit in the text, this interpretation is strongly implied through textual and subtextual cues, and I hope to persuade the reader of its veracity in the following essays.  

Did anyone else read the text this way?  Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments.  A special thanks to Cecile de Forest for talking about the book with me and for sharing her insights.

Incest & Turned Tables.

All her life, the protagonist has undergone correction and discipline at the hands of her siblings, her teachers, and assorted relatives and community members in positions of authority.  Foremost among her disciplinarians is her oldest brother.  When he reaches sexual maturity, the beautiful oldest brother takes part “in group chats where compromising images [are] shared of unconsenting individuals” (24), a detail that reveals his particular fetish for total domination and humiliation, and he takes a particular interest in the protagonist, taking it upon himself to remedy her congenital defects (24) through painstaking care and attention.  The protagonist recounts,

[H]e made me understand the necessity of temperance and silence.  I had made an essential error when organising my consciousness early on in life, my brother explained, and this was by entertaining the idea that it was reasonable for me to form my own judgements about the world […]  [I]t was a conviction particularly unwarranted and deep-seated in my case.  It would not be easy to remedy, no, it would be my life’s work to reorient all my desires in the service of another, that was the most I should expect to achieve (24-25).

Through his discipline and correction, the protagonist reorients herself, continuing,

I tried to be good.  I smiled as I did the bidding of others.  I did my work and looked perfectly happy, tidy and unobjectionable, shining, shining the boot.  Kneeling, crouching, toing and froing, standing too for hours at the foot of a bed, later sitting perhaps on the edge of a chair, ankles crossed, thighs apart, a look that should have been an offering.  I did as I was asked, yes, but the outcome was too often unanticipated.  Some problem in me people always felt but could not prove.  What did I give?  The sword for the sponge.  Muscular where one would not expect it.  And then a troubling streak just perceptible, perhaps, in the gaze (26, emphasis added).

“Angel” (1998) by Paula Rego

Thighs apart, a look that should have been an offering.  Vague, unstable language – language that we cannot pin down, that can be easily disavowed.  An oblique allusion to childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by her brother, I glossed over it initially, until more evidence emerged that couldn’t be ignored.  The “sword for the sponge” (see the Paula Rego painting above!) hints at her covertly defiant, even vengeful, nature, which she assiduously conceals (the sponge cleans up the blood, hiding every trace), though it manifests later.  The protagonist grows up, visits her brother on his Eastern European estate when he requests her presence, and begins serving him.  After a few days, he abruptly leaves on a business trip and eventually returns, looking well and tanned (134). For a while, they find peace again: “The days slowly grew shorter, and I worked to submerge myself once more.  Time passed, and I went under.  That’s all.  My brother prevailed, as we always meant him to” (153).

Soon, however, a change occurs in the protagonist’s brother, which she attributes to a mysterious malady: “I began to notice, that some barely perceptible change had occurred in his person, in his behaviour” (158).  Although his work life has remained unaffected, in his private life with the protagonist, her brother becomes inattentive and abstracted (158-159).  He stares off into space and stops correcting her.  Is she angry that he has lost interest in dominating her? She declares, “I would […] have to take matters into my own hands, in the interests of his health, of his well-being” (159) and decides to commence a strict regimen of dry brushing to restore him to health.

The inspiration for this course of treatment is from a muted television programme, and the protagonist alleges that she comprehends the wordless dialogue on the un-subtitled screen, presumably in the foreign language that she cannot understand (160); this insistence further demonstrates her belief that she can “hear” silences (160), as she has learned to do her whole life: “I came to understand what [the] silence asked of me” (28).  While the protagonist assigns whatever meaning she desires to these silences – proof she exercises her will, she believes instead that she is interpreting them correctly – in denial of her will, only in the service of others’ wills.  It is also an instance where her grasp of reality seems… tenuous.  Another is when she sees the two figures in white on the hill and refers to the female as the town’s shopkeeper (176), although the shopkeeper is clearly male (162-163).  Of course, she also talks to herself while lying at the edge of the lake in the woods (47), but we shouldn’t hold that against her as evidence of insanity, for who among us has not sung to the plants while gardening?

The protagonist’s brother does not consent to the regimen of dry brushing (164), and the protagonist hounds him to every corner of the house to prevail upon him.  Finally, he stops speaking entirely (165) and surrenders to her, whereupon she reflects that once she “had taken the time to listen closely,” she found that her “brother had always been in agreement” with her, and “what’s more,” that the “whole enterprise had actually been of his own conception” (165).  Uttering only objections before losing his will to power, her brother finally capitulates to her demands, but the protagonist disavows her overpowering of him and instead pretends that it was really his idea all along, presumably because she derives psychological and sexual satisfaction from disavowing her own will to power (calling it a will to powerlessness).  She wants to absolve herself of responsibility while switching from the submissive to the dominant role in the relationship.

Despite instituting this regimen of vigorous and frequent dry brushing, the protagonist’s brother continues to decline, so she redoubles her efforts, brushing him every hour and adding a thorough lymphatic massage at the end of every brushing session.  She notes,

I felt fulfilled, perhaps for the first time in my life, […] I was giving myself up at last and entirely to my brother body and soul, occupying every corner of him, bending to his will, or in the absence of will, bending at the very least to the needs of his body, the needs of his soul […].  All his teachings, I felt, through childhood, through adolescence, to this day, had been leading to this point, my sublimation of myself in my brother, for my brother. […] Still I pressed on, without distinction, renouncing even despair, waiting on my brother, cooling his fevers, reviving him from his lethargies, tending to the health of his gut, the dexterity of his limbs, the movement of his vital fluids, the pink of his complexion, the promotion of his salubriousness foremost in my thoughts at all times (167-169, emphasis added).

She’s attending to the movement of his vital fluids?  Here’s another incestuous detail that I initially ignored in favor of focusing on the pitched battle between dominant geographic forces and subaltern transformative ones (see Part II).  If that phrase can be explained away, a subsequent scene is even more incriminating: the protagonist’s brother retreats into his room to escape his sister’s ministrations to his body, seeking privacy, and she defies his wishes, continuing to open the doors in order to deny him any privacy (171-172).  Ultimately, she obtains a skeleton key for the house without his knowledge so that she can visit him at night while he sleeps (171-172).  She divulges that she “cannot be faulted” for opening the doors, a habit inculcated by her brother, for he had so seldom shut doors before his illness, “having always stipulated that all doors remain open” (172).  She continues, “[H]e especially liked to dress in the doorway of his room, making sure I watched, he liked me, too, to keep open my door, located at such a curious angle that no matter where I stood in the room I could not go unobserved” (172).  They’re mutual voyeurs.  Even at the beginning of the novel, she explains that part of her service entails washing and dressing her brother and that she enjoys it (21).  While bizarre, the reader can explain the bathing and dressing away as nothing untoward, until we get the details about her moving his vital fluids and insisting on invading his privacy, for they always have watched each other naked in the past.  Finally, the contextual and subtextual clues come together to reveal something sinister and sexually perverse.  The yuckiest – and saddest – part for me is realizing that when the protagonist writes that she doesn’t enjoy sex with other lovers – their touch isn’t meant for her and could be done to anyone, their actions feel impersonal and make her feel interchangeable with countless others (12-13) – the subtext is that no one else gives her the same sexual satisfaction that her brother does, that she has imprinted on him sexually.  Oy.

The protagonist’s brother, once such an eloquent speaker, loses his power of speech and falls into muteness, his silence only pierced by unintelligible groans and grunts in aborted attempts at speech (168).  At last he is reduced to imprisonment in his own house, pacing the floorboards helplessly when his sister goes on long walks (170).  When the protagonist figures out that her brother has been trying to communicate with the townspeople on his mobile phone, ostensibly to call for help, she confiscates it, patronizing and treating him as an idiot child: “social media was a poison, was in all likelihood contributing to his overall enervation, I had explained all this to him with the utmost clarity and compassion” (181).  She reminds him that “there [are] no medical professionals with the competencies required to treat his condition, peculiar as it was, only I” am capable (182). Then she threatens to remand him to a psychiatric facility if he does not willingly cooperate: “Did he want to be sectioned and carted off to the psychiatric ward, I asked him, that perfectly unsuitable lakeside institution with an open-door policy, where the lunatics roamed freely […]?  Of course not, I said, draping a blanket over his shoulders” (182).  She sees that her brother has been trying to contact the local doctor and coroner, and she responds thus:

What, I said to my brother, taking him by the shoulders, dead already!  Ha!  I led him to the sofa in the front room, still chuckling, and at my direction he sat down, so docile his mien, so panicked his eye.  I tucked the blanket around him.  No, I thought, they would not come for him, he must understand that now, must understand, yes, that history for them was indeed a matter of flesh and bone, that no amount of rehabilitation could make it otherwise, no, those paths had been laid out long ago (183). 

Love is a cannibalistic frog.

“I continued to spend the long years […] cultivating solitude, pursuing silence to its ever-receding horizon, […] a self-forgetfulness on my part that would enable me to bring to bear the most painstaking, the most careful consideration to the other, to treat the other as the worthiest object of contemplation.  In this process, I would become reduced, diminished, ultimately I would become clarified, even cease to exist.  I would be good.  I would be all that had ever been asked of me.”  Study for Obedience, p. 3

“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (cover) by Emily Browning

It is curious – unbelievable, really – that the protagonist’s brother has so suddenly and inexplicably been afflicted with this mysterious illness, since she describes his country life and access to “fresh air” (5) as offering “a robust life, a hale life, […] a much healthier lifestyle” than that of the city (51).  In fact, prior to his infirmity, she pronounces him a paragon of health: “[M]y brother, prior to his illness, had been exactly this sort of vigorous person, could be found, at any given time, running a marathon or energetically and in a team rowing a skiff on rough seas” (51).

What we know is that he leaves her abruptly, only several days upon her arrival at his house, and that she is disappointed (21): “I was disappointed at this news, so soon after our reunion, but comforted myself with the notion that his sudden departure meant I could roam more freely and at leisure, observing the frog life, which was prolific that spring, spawning in ponds and roadside puddles” (21). 

She then relates her interest in frogs to a childhood memory:

Frogs had been a fixture of our childhood summers, my eldest brother often sent me out on excursions to capture a certain number of them, which he put to undisclosed use, […] an endeavor for which I employed a pair of tongs and a packet of frankfurters, lying on my belly on the dock every day for a week before I caught the creature […].  On one particularly hot day, he placed two of the captive frogs side by side on the edge of the lake – one, much larger, my brother supposed to be a female, for reasons he would not reveal; the other, he said, clearly a juvenile male.  My brother watched the frogs closely, with an anticipation I did not understand, until at all once [sic], the larger frog turned and swallowed her companion whole.  A single flipper flailed in her mouth.  She swallowed again, and was still.  I knew I must not weep, I must not scream, I must not run, though I wanted to do these things, yes, and to retch until my skin turned inside out.  I was, it must be said, a sensitive child.  My brother observed me closely.  I knew he, together with the rest of my siblings, once they were informed, and who had been engaged in similar hunting operations nearby, would hold me responsible for this act of cannibalism, and they did, using it as further evidence, presented to our parents, who were at that moment sunning themselves quietly on the dock, of my essentially barbarous nature that needed to be controlled.  And they did.  They gave me direction.  They gave me purpose.  I lived for them.  I lived especially for my brother, the eldest, the most handsome, most beloved of all of the siblings (21-23).

Has the protagonist not become the cannibalistic frog, who has finally cannibalized her brother, the object of her affection and singular attention?  The prophecy has been fulfilled.  Is the protagonist’s essentially and ontologically monstrous nature the result of inborn tendencies, of years of instruction and abuse, or of the curse of a hostile land – or all three? “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” quipped Simone de Beauvoir famously in The Second Sex.  Her cannibalism belies her brother’s guilt; indeed, it indicts everyone who has scapegoated, negated, and abused her.

Beauty is something to be eaten: plant expertise & poisonous herbs in service of Munchausen by proxy syndrome.

When her brother arrives after his extended absence, the protagonist is particularly attentive and obsequious (135) and reflects, “I felt he was flattered by the attention, that he tucked in gratefully” (135).  Then she remarks, “If at times I detected a slight suspicious cast in my brother’s glance, in his aspect, as though my attentions were insincere, as if there existed in me some obscure motivation, I simply bowed my head, lowered my voice, sweetened my look” (136).  What reason would he have to be suspicious?  Why does she need to deflect his suspicions? What is her deception; what is she concealing? 

“You Know I’m No Good” by Amy Winehouse

In his absence, the protagonist becomes an amateur botanist and master gardener, studying the local flora and producing an abundance of vegetables to supplement her brother’s stores of dry goods (52-53).  The text mentions her diligent study of the plants – foods, herbs, and inedible flora – several times (45-46, 52-53, 130, 133), which is underscored in a couple passages, first this one:

At first I stayed away from the town in the valley, supplementing my brother’s stores of dry goods with vegetables from the overgrown kitchen garden.  I got to know my immediate surroundings.  […]  I felt the cold ground of the kitchen garden give beneath me as I knelt down, so many hours spent weeding […].  I untangled the tender leafy greens from the viny plants that had grown around them, wondering about the lives of cabbages, their hearts and their vitality.  They did not know, how could they, the care and attention with which I applied myself to them, and I loved them for that, the essential mystery of their being, no exposition possible, no question of knowing or being known, the beautiful, the unthinkable cabbages!  The kales too, and the mustard greens, even the garlic, having survived the winter, throwing out its slender stalks.  Do you understand what I am saying?  Beauty is something to be eaten; it is a food (52-53). 

Beauty is something to be eaten!  On the surface, this phrase, another example of the protagonist’s linguistic unreliability and illegibility (27), simply indicates her green thumb, her love of nature, her commitment to self-sufficiency and to a symbiotic relationship with the land by growing food and tending to plants.  Below the surface and in context, however, it hints at the marriage between her desired outcome vis-à-vis her brother and her knowledge of plants, both salubrious and noxious.  For instance, she surmises that her “new habit of hanging nettles and other plants, hanging chamomile flowers, to dry from the town’s barn, in such great profusion” (133) has become annoying to the townspeople.  From all this plant knowledge, the text implies that she has developed significant herbal knowledge.  My inference is that the protagonist is poisoning her brother through an herbal concotion, experimenting with how much to give him in order to enervate him and render him speechless and powerless to her domination while keeping him alive.  Belladonna, perhaps?  I don’t know; unlike the protagonist, I’m not an herbalist, haha.

I can’t think of another explanation to account for her brother’s sickness and her response to it, but if you have an alternative one, please share it! I’d love a juicy discussion on the book.  From this reading, my interpretation is that she has Munchausen by proxy syndrome and is inducing her brother’s illness in order to keep him dependent on her.  What a Gothic twist! 

This book reminds me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist Gothic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which employs gothic tropes while asserting a feminist social critique.  Study for Obedience offers both a feminist critique and a critique of brutal social domination (particularly the history of European anti-Semitism), and whereas in Part II I’ll try to elucidate the critique of political violence and of minority dispossession, in Part I, I want to link the perverted Gothic aesthetic of the protagonist’s revenge against an abusive male – the domination over her brother, the turning of the tables – to an explicitly feminist critique.

One example of this critique emerges when the protagonist recounts a story about a powerful man at the news agency where she worked who left in disgrace for quid-pro-quo sexual harassment and assault and cost many women careers in reporting (141).  She bitterly laments the culture in which too many people make too many excuses to defend indefensible male behavior, reflecting that “a man could be both sad and a scumbag, that in fact sadness was the excuse these men most often availed themselves of” (141). 

Right after this recollection, the protagonist muses that certain disclosures enable various degrees of domination and submission in a continuum of the mutually-bound master-slave dialectic or relationship: creditor-debtor, blackmailer-blackmailed, sadist-masochist.  Generally, men use disclosures, or private vulnerable information, to force women into submission in order to subordinate and abuse them. 

In an introspective move that seems unrelated but only makes sense when we understand that the protagonist seeks to justify her domination over her brother by attributing it to asymmetric disclosures in their relationship, the protagonist asserts that her brother “had made a category error, […] had failed to live up to the obligation his confession about the ruin of his marriage entailed” (143), causing the reader to ask, what obligation does his disclosure entail, in the protagonist’s mind?  The text frequently repeats the word “disclosure,” with its double entendre of meanings, and alludes to its opposite, concealment.  “What was required to make a life,” the protagonist attests, “was the disclosure of space” (31). In counterposing enclosure, which is closing off, privatizing, or making unavailable, disclosure is an opening up and is thus coded feminine; in opening itself up, it’s a space that receives, an opportunity or invitation for inhabitation, and a making of oneself vulnerable through confession.  While her brother has divulged “terrible disclosures,” the protagonist has nothing to reveal and instead expresses “a sense of being beholden to him, an aspect of fear and awe, not totally manufactured” (143).  

In opening himself up, her brother makes himself available for her ultimate possession of him.  The protagonist seeks revenge against him: on the microcosmic level of their relationship, because he has stopped playing their BDSM game, having lost interest.  

On the macrocosmic level, she is tired – of abusive men and the rape culture, tired of hearing the “most abominable stories in the dead of night” while working at a crisis line (139), tired of stories of fourteen-year-old girls in emergency rooms (140), tired of men who manipulate the law to punish the good and protect the wicked (34-36, 140).  Perhaps she’s tired of a dominant male viewpoint like her brother’s, evinced when he lectures her on the fact that their people were not “innocent victims, no” (143) and tells a patriarchal, victim-blaming version of their people’s history (143-146).  She’s tired.

“I’m Tired” by Madeline Kahn (Blazing Saddles)

The protagonist’s brother, then, represents an abusive male, a “sad scumbag” who “despise[s] weaklings, detest[s] victims, [finds] self-pity, personal grief and collective mourning abhorrent” (144) but clings to a narrative about the demise of his marriage which figures him primarily as a suffering victim (13-14).  The sad scumbag needs to be punished and corrected; he’s the new scapegoat who will suffer for the sins of his entire male class.  If the “meek get kicked in the teeth” (29), let it be someone else’s turn.

“Army of Me” by björk