The Feminist Critique on Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
Even before American Psycho (1991) came out, discussion about the novel started across the Nation. The publishing company’s staff, the editor, the National Organization for Women and countless critics got involved. Some questioned the author’s capabilities to write such a novel, others critiqued the novel’s useless violence and sexualization of women and women’s bodies. In this essay, I will explain how the controversy started, who reacted to it in what way and what Ellis thought about it. Then, I will share my opinion on the novel, and on which side of the controversy I am on.
The controversy started when a couple of excerpts of American Psycho were distributed amongst the Simon & Shuster staff, who was supposed to publish the novel. According to O’Brien, female employees at Simon and Shuster started to protest the novel’s publication, when they read the excerpts and realised what the novel was about. Then, the staff began ‘circulating some of the more infamous passages … and inevitably, [they] were quickly leaked to the press’ (Murpet 66-7). What followed was a whirlwind of newspaper articles spreading the novel’s contents and soon, critics shared their opinions on the novel. As Murphet states, ‘most of the media firestorm erupted before anyone had seen the manuscript or read a word besides the leaked passages’ (67). Eventually, Simon & Shuster decided not to go forward with publishing it. The company’s CEO declared: ‘It was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (Macmillan). However, Ellis’s agent Amanda Urban and his editor Robert Asahina agreed that although the manuscript included shocking material, the novel was interesting enough for it to be published by someone else (Murphet 67). Sonny Mehta, a publisher at Vintage Books, decided to publish the novel and ‘he and Ellis both received death threats when it was published’ (Macmillan). Because of those threats and the response the novel had received so far, there would not be a promotional tour and Vintage would not advertise the novel (Cohen).
The Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) also offered critique on the novel after they read the leaked excerpts. They called American Psycho a ‘how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women’, and the president, Tammy Bruce, called for a boycott of the novel (McDowell). She called on NOW members and the general public to ‘exercise their right of free expression by refusing to buy the novel so the publisher will “learn that violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable”’ (Murphet 68). The NOW cautioned that the novel, with its ‘graphic descriptions of lethal misogyny’ would seem inspirational to some readers (Caputi 103). Not only did Bruce call for a boycott of American Psycho, but of ‘all Vintage and Knopf books, except those by feminist authors’ (O’Brien). Bruce stated that the boycott will ‘show the gatekeepers of this culture … that the women of this country will no longer tolerate gratuitous violence for the sake of profit and entertainment’ (O’Brien). Bruce released a 15-minute message which included an excerpt of American Psycho to reach the greater public. The National Organization for Women also wanted to meet with Mehta, but he refused (O’Brien). The excerpts reached other publishing companies as well, and Roger Straus Jr of Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, called American Psycho ‘the most revolting book [he has] ever read. To say that it has any redeeming social value, or that mainstream film and television contain equally offensive material, is bullshit’ (O’Brien).
The controversy is as follows: many critics have argued that American Psycho is sexist and reflects Bret Easton Ellis’s misogyny. The novel includes several graphic scenes in which women are tortured, including being bound up with rope, nipples getting eaten, being electrocuted, and limbs getting chopped off (Ellis 290-1; 329). Roger Straus commented that ‘the horrors perpetrated in that book go far and beyond anything that has ever been written or depicted’ (O’Brien). According to him, this is the most female-unfriendly novel ever written. Julian Murphet states that ‘Bateman’s misogyny is a reflex, a symptom, of the fact that his ‘taste’ in women is based on an absolute divorce between him and ‘them’ at every level: culturally, psychologically, emotionally, intellectually, professionally, etc.’ (69). Murphet argues that the reason for this particular portrayal of women is due to the author’s lack of connection to and understanding of women. Roger Rosenblatt, lastly, argues that the novel displays ‘gratuitous degradation of (…) women in particular’ (Murphet 69). Ellis himself received negative backlash as well, and Murphet argued that only a ‘warped and deranged intellectual’ would write such a novel, writing down his ‘masturbatory fantasies solely ‘for his own self-aggrandisement’ (71). In other words, many believe that the novel is misogynistic, sexist, and unnecessarily violent towards women.
Many critics are not of opinion that the novel is inherently sexist, and that there are different reasons for the novel’s scandal. Norman Mailer claims that ‘the true cause of the scandal lay with American Psycho’s moral/aesthetic ambiguity and Ellis’s lack of novelistic skill’ (Mailer 154). Mailer is not necessarily critiquing the contents of the novel, but his main issue lies with Ellis. Quoted in The Guardian, Mailer believes that the novel ‘needs a greater writer than Bret Easton Ellis to do it properly’ (Weldon). Thus, Mailer sees no issue with the novel’s contents. Instead, he understood Ellis’s urge to write such a daring novel and even believed it was necessary to include a murderer to fight against the ‘moral and political nightmare of the 1980s in America’ (Murphet 70). Several people, among whom Fay Weldon, have, on the other hand, argued that Ellis is a good writer. She states: ‘American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel which revolves about its own nasty bits’ (The Guardian). While many have argued that the novel’s graphic descriptions would inspire readers, Weldon argues that ‘The books and the films don’t create society, I promise you. They reflect it’ (The Guardian). So, many critics support Ellis and do not believe the novel is sexist at all, but believe it is an important novel to understand important issues in society.
Ellis himself had not expected the outbreak of critique, nor did he think the novel was controversial. In his own words: ‘I didn’t think there was enough in the book to make it that shocking’ (Murphet 67). Ellis does not think a novel filled with torture and murder is shocking. Roger Cohen summarized Ellis’s response to the controversy in a New York Times article, and Ellis defends himself in a couple of different ways. Firstly, he states that he ‘is not Bateman’, meaning that he is not the culprit in this situation: ‘People seem to insist that I am a monster. But Bateman is the monster. I am not on the side of that creep’ (Cohen). Then, he says that the reason for why the descriptions of the murders are so vivid, is because everything that Bateman does and thinks is described with a lot of detail: ‘It seemed clear to me that Bateman would describe the acts of brutality in the same numbing, excessive detail and flat tone that he recounts everything else – his clothing, his meals, his workouts at the gym’ (Cohen). Lastly, he says that society is quick to overreact when a novel tends to be controversial: ‘I guess you walk a very thin line when you try to write about a serial killer in a very satirical way … there’s this new sensitivity. You cannot risk offending anyone’ (Cohen). In other words, he is blaming the controversy on society and he is taking himself out of the equation by making Bateman, the fictional character that Ellis created, the real felon.
I believe that American Psycho is a misogynistic novel, because of the violence it displays towards women, because this violence is combined with the sexualization of women, and because the sole purpose of women in this novel is to please the men. Firstly, the novel displays an extreme amount of violence towards women. The use of violence is not entirely unexpected, because the novel is about a serial killer. as Kathryn Hume puts it: ‘we find ample opportunity to feel horror in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho’ (121). However, the way in which the main character, Patrick Bateman, treats female characters is unacceptable. For example, the most well-known passage from the novel is all about a woman being tortured by Bateman, in the rat scene: ‘I’m trying to ease one of the hollow plastic tubes … up into her vagina … with the girl still conscious … the rat racing up the tube … and I yank the tube out of the girl, trapping the rodent’ (328-329). And even when Bateman admits that it is a ‘characteristically useless, senseless death’ he does not stop. He ‘cut[s] the girl in two’ and makes sure ‘she stays alive long enough to watch me pull her legs away from her body’ (Ellis 329). Ellis defends himself by saying that he ‘didn’t want to write [the details of the murders] but knew they had to be there,’ but he makes sure not to give an explanation. Then, he says ‘I read a lot of books about serial killers and picked up details from that and then … someone could get me criminology textbooks from the FBI … That’s why I did the research, because I couldn’t have made this up’ (Hume 123). In other words, some of the murders in this book have occurred in real life, and Ellis used them for fictional purposes. This is completely unacceptable and shows Ellis’s misogyny.
Additionally, the violence towards women is always combined with the sexualization of women, making the two inseparable and creating a problematic connection between the two. Jane Caputi, who researched serial killer stories in contemporary fiction, calls the novel a work of ‘femicidal pornography,’ and remarks that when Bateman murders male characters, the murders happen quickly, take place in a public space, and are asexual (Caputi 103). But when Bateman murders female characters, the scenes are very extensive, take place in a private space and include sadomasochistic sexual descriptions, with the obvious intent of arousing the reader (Caputi 103). Then, now that the reader has become ‘sexually primed’, the women are murdered in extremely violent, sexual ways (Caputi 104). This is problematic because a connection between pornography and violence is made which becomes inseparable throughout the novel. In one of these instances, Bateman uses a lighter until ‘both eyeballs burst. While she’s still conscious I roll her over, and spreading her ass cheeks, I nail a dildo that I’ve tied to a board deep into her rectum, using the nail gun’ (Ellis 305). In scenes such as this one, the violence is sexualized and eroticized, fusing arousal with vivid descriptions of misogynistic violence (Wolf 34). Thus, the excessive amounts of violence are combined with pornographic descriptions, creating a problematic connection between sex and violence.
Lastly, American Psycho is a sexist novel because the female characters are sexually objectified and are only there to please the men. The women in this novel are completely put to the background of the novel. Throughout the novel, the women are referred to as ‘hardbodies’, or if they are not conventionally pretty, they are all women with issues. Moreover, more important female characters such as Evelyn Richards, Bateman’s fiancé, and Courtney Lawrence, Luis Carruthers’ partner, only have a role in the novel because they are involved with a male character. They are only involved in conversations when the conversation is about how they please or are a benefit to the men. Whereas the male characters actually have conversations, the female characters are merely there for the visual satisfaction of the men. Besides, both minor, insignificant female characters and more important female characters in this novel are written to be unintelligent, concerned with only superficial things. Jean, Bateman’s secretary, is completely obedient to him. He, then, assumes she wants to marry him, and he mentions this regularly. In fact, many of the female characters that Bateman deals with, are obsessed with Bateman, according to him. Thus, the female characters in this novel are sexually objectified and their only role is to please the male characters and obey them.
In conclusion, American Psycho sparked controversy even before it got released. People, especially women, disagreed with the amount of violence towards women that was displayed in the novel. Several feminist organizations, including the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women, did not want the novel to be a success, to show that there is no more room for misogyny in society. The original publishers dropped the book, but Vintage picked it up and published it instead. After the novel’s release, the discussion about the novel grew bigger and bigger, and newspapers and online magazines alike published opinion pieces and analyses. I believe that it is an inherently sexist novel, due to the novel’s violence against women, the violence which is then combined with pornographic imagery, and the fact that all female characters are there to please and obey the men.
Works Cited
Caputi, Jane. ‘American Psychos: The Serial Killer in Contemporary Fiction.’ Journal of American Culture, vol. 16, no. 4, 1993, pp 101-112.
Cohen, Roger. ‘Bret Easton Ellis Answers Critics of ‘American Psycho’. The New York Times, 6 March, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/06/books/bret-easton-ellis-answers-critics-of-american-psycho.html
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. Picador, London, 1991.
Kathryn Hume, ‘Violence’. Aggressive Fictions: Reading the Contemporary American Novel. Cornell University Press, 2011, pp. 115-140.
Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on “American Psycho.”’ Vanity Fair,
1991, pp. 154-220.
Macmillan, Pan. ‘American Psycho: A History of Controversy.’ 26 September 2016, https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/literary/american-psycho-controversy-banned-book-censorship
McDowell, Edwin. ‘NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.’ The New York Times, 6 December 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/06/books/now-chapter-seeks-boycott-of-psycho-novel.html
Murphet, Julian. ‘Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide.’ Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, New York/London, 2002.
O’Brien, Maureen. ‘The ‘American Psycho’ Controversy.’ Entertainment Weekly, 8 March 1991. https://ew.com/article/1991/03/08/american-psycho-controversy/
Wolf, Naomi. ‘The Animals Speak.’ New Statesmen and Society, 1991, pp. 33-34.
Weldon, Fay. ‘An Honest American Psycho: Why We Can’t Cope with Bret Easton Ellis’s New Novel.’ The Guardian, 25 April, 1991. https://www.theguardian.com/books/1991/apr/25/fiction.breteastonellis
Iris Elske 