‘Sex sells” is a truism few would dispute—and it holds true for the successful career of the Irish literary star Sally Rooney who has remarked that in her work, “the driver is erotic tension or desire.” Her novels are typically categorized as realist romantic comedies that turn around modified marriage plots, but as she says, it is the erotic that motivates her characters. Indeed, to a degree not widely remarked upon, nothing of any real consequence happens in a Rooney novel except sex, and the turmoil leading up to and following its consummation. But what kind of sex?
“Eileen informs Simon that what he needs is ‘a little wife.’”
The answer is surprising. Rooney presents her protagonists (like herself) as outspoken supporters of progressive social causes. Open a page in any of her novels and you’ll find the characters castigating the rich, championing anarchists and communists and feminists, deploring climate change and capitalism and the patriarchy. Yet while they publicly embrace progressive politics, privately their views about desire and sex are at odds with the typical stances we would expect of Rooney and her educated readership. Their sex lives—particularly those of her female characters—fall into patterns that are traditional and “heteronormative,” even regressive. The dilemma with which readers are left is how to reconcile her self-proclaimed Marxist progressive stances with the conservative sexual ideology that determines her characters’ actions and fates.
“Fucking” is a word that Rooney rarely uses. Instead, she employs dull euphemisms like: “He moved inside her.” Yet Rooney is often concerned with the non-rational and potentially destructive nature of sex evoked by that word. In Beautiful World Where Are You, the two main characters stay in touch throughout the story through email. At one point, Alice writes to Eileen: “It seems to me we walk around all the time feeling these absurdly strong impulses and desires, strong enough to make us want to ruin our own lives and sabotage our marriages and careers.”
Alice is onto something, but she leads a rather vanilla sex life, as do most of Rooney’s female characters. This may have something to do with their male partners, all of whom are milquetoast as lovers and tend to be one-and-done type of guys. For the most part, sex in Rooney’s novels happens calmly and quietly, during the course of conversation—over tea as it were—or, perhaps better: as if it were taking place in the upstairs bedroom of one’s childhood home while the parents are downstairs pretending to watch the news.
Only one of Rooney’s characters experiences “intoxicating” sex: Frances, the protagonist of Conversations With Friends. The bisexual Frances suffers from depression and low self-esteem, saying: “I figured my own body as an item of garbage, an empty wrapper or a half-eaten and discarded piece of fruit.” Nick, who is 11 years older and married, is the first man she fucks. It is so good that she cries while it is happening.
Frances asks Nick to fuck her hard, and then harder, and when he does, she discovers that “after a while it felt so good that I couldn’t see clearly any more, and I wasn’t sure if I could pronounce whole sentences. I kept saying, please, please, though I didn’t know what I was asking him for.” What she was asking for is the kind of sexual pleasure that only occurs when one’s conscious self is obliterated and one reverts to an animal state. This is the form satisfaction that Georges Bataille described as a “turmoil of the senses.” More colloquially, it is described as having your brains fucked out.
Frances wants her brains fucked out for a specific reason. She uses sex to annihilate her feelings of worthlessness, which up until this point she had been doing by cutting, pinching, and biting herself until she bleeds. At one point during sex, she tries to get Nick to choke her, and when he refuses, she asks him to hit her. He balks at this as well, and Frances hoists the white flag of surrender that Rooney’s other female characters will wave in an act of submission: “You can do whatever you want with me.” Nick doesn’t, they argue, and he leaves, but they reunite again at the end of the novel. It is a romantic comedy after all.
In Rooney’s sophomore novel, Normal People, we follow the sexual escapades of another damaged woman, Marianne, who has suffered abuse at the hands of her father and brother. Like Frances, she suffers from low self-esteem and also indulges in self-harm, burning herself, or chewing her cheek “until the pain begins to settle her nerves.” She is a “friendless loser” who has “never believed herself fit to be loved by any person.”
She hooks up with Connell, a nice guy from the neighborhood, and has sex with him on a regular basis. But Connell doesn’t understand why she, like Frances, wants him to hit her during sex. His inability to understand her need leads to their (temporary) separation. Marianne’s desire to be dominated during sex is irrepressible, and eventually she finds men to satisfy it. The first who fits the bill is Jamie. He immediately starts to “tie her up and beat her with various objects.” She hates herself for this but her self-loathing triggers her desire to be subjugated. Her feelings of self-hate coupled with the physical sensations of being beaten during sex empties her brain, allowing her to orgasm.
Eventually, Marianne takes up again with Connell. She tries to get him to hit her, which he refuses to do. Towards the end of the novel, Connell explains Marianne’s aberrant behavior by saying she suffers from an “unnamable spiritual injury.” He is incapable of naming it (he’s not that bright), but we can. Abuse: the physical and perhaps sexual abuse inflicted upon her by her father and brother. The family crucible in which she was forged has made her feel that “she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right … only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.” Like Frances, she longs to be abused by her lovers during sex not to achieve some sort of ecstatic bliss, but to erase the psychic pain inscribed in her by an abusive upbringing.
In the end, Rooney does not arrange a BDSM libidinal swap of pain for pleasure for Marianne. She tells us that Connell learned to master her with “effortless tyranny” and give her what she needs, leaving her “open, weak, powerless, sometimes crying.” He finds a way to get her to submit without violence. The love he feels for her has a transformative power—an important theme for Rooney. “Having had this experience of falling in love when I was very young,” Rooney has written, “with somebody who completely transformed my life, and transforms it every day, has allowed me to write stories about people whose lives are transformed by love.” Indeed, this is the conclusion of the novel. Connell and Marianne are back together: “She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed.”
There is less sex in Beautiful World, Where Are You than in the previous two novels and the two lead female protagonists, Alice and Eileen, are not as psychologically and emotionally wounded as Frances and Marianne. Much of the novel consists of didactic emails between the two protagonists. Alice is a millionaire novelist who complains a lot about her success. She has fallen for Felix, a non-reading warehouse-worker (one might compare his function to the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover). Eileen is an editor of a literary magazine in love with her childhood sweetheart Simon.
The relatively small amount of sex in this novel is made up for by the lengthy set pieces that work to establish male dominance during sex. The longest one occurs between Alice and Felix. The scene begins with Alice kissing Felix’s fingers. She puts “the tip of his index finger in her mouth,” which leads to his putting his middle finger in her mouth, which leads him to ask for head. She performs this act of service, and asks if what she’s doing is “ok.” He tells her “Yeah, it’s good,” but stops her and suggests she should get on top of him. She undresses and mounts him and the talking continues: “Like if I said, I want you to suck my cock, you probably wouldn’t like it,” he says. He then asks whether she hates the word “fuck” and she says she doesn’t, thereby giving him permission to say he wants to fuck her. When he begins to do so, Alice is startled at the size of his member even though it was just recently in her mouth. Felix tells her how good she looks and why he thinks she is sexy; his sweet talk helps her to climax.
If the sex scene between Alice and Felix is one of the longest, the one between Simon and Eileen is one of the funniest because of its “patriarchal” humor—and because it happens over the phone. Eileen has just gotten out of a relationship in which she had spent half her 20s. The man, she says, “just got sick of me. I mean, that’s what happened. I bored him.” At home after an evening out, she calls Simon and the two of them enact an erotic fantasy over 11 pages in which Eileen informs Simon that what he needs is “a little wife” for himself. She then describes what that little wife would do for him. She would work less than her man and be home in time to have dinner waiting. She might let him work a little more afterwards, but they would soon go to bed and “the wife would give you head. Which she’s really good at.” She goes on to describe this “perfect wife” while reminding him how she gave him a blow job in Paris and swallowed his semen, which, she tells him, “made me feel very self-confident.” This charming tale of domestic bliss gets Simon hot and he jerks off while listening. Thrilled with her performance, Eileen masturbates when it’s over and goes to sleep.
Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, is a story largely about the Koubek brothers, Peter and Ivan, who are thrown into an existential crisis after their father dies. Peter is that lucky man who has two women at his disposal: Sylvia, a professor, who is his age, and Naomi, who is unemployed and homeless, and much younger. Peter divides his time between the love from his youth, Sylvia, and the freewheeling, sexually liberated Naomi. Ivan, meanwhile, hooks up with an older, married woman, Margaret, and immediately falls in love.
“There is no lack of miracles in Rooney’s work.”
Peter and Sylvia have broken off their relationship because a “mysterious” accident prevents her from having penetrative sex. They still love each other, however, and in one scene, Sylvia jerks him off. After he comes, he immediately proposes marriage—and, in the one spot of humor in the entire novel, she responds: “Was it that good?”
Unlike the damaged, dour, bitter Sylvia, Naomi exhibits an “irrepressible love of life.” She is a free spirit, the most unconflicted of any of Rooney’s characters. She is not a careerist and owns “nothing in the world but her own perfect body.” However, when Peter is having sex with Naomi, she submits to him and says what we’ve heard before from other Rooney characters: “You can do whatever you want with me.” Peter doesn’t take her up on her offer, and is careful to get her consent to whatever he does, “Like this, alright?” “Just use me,” she begs him, “just do whatever you want. You can hurt me, it doesn’t matter.” He finally does what she asks. But from his dominant economic and social position (he is a lawyer), all he can think about is the way she allows herself “to be used like this … played with like a doll.”
Sex isn’t a zone of liberation for these characters—it’s something primitive and binding. Peter recognizes the brute “animal stupidity of desire.” Ivan, Peter’s brother, describes desire as “not at all that pleasurable a feeling: maybe a small bit pleasurable, but mostly frustrating and embarrassing, and also anxiety-inducing.” And poor Margaret, Ivan’s girlfriend, experiences “the worst, most vulgar form of selfishness … which is desire. A shameful thing, the sexual motive. In a woman, especially.”
Rather a regressive thought for an independent, liberated working woman, but telling of Rooney’s sexual ideology. A similar idea is given voice in Beautiful World when Simon tells Eileen what he experiences when they have sex: “It’s something that I’m doing to you, for my own reasons. And maybe you get some kind of innocent physical pleasure out of it, I hope you do, but for me it’s different.” Eileen agrees with him and draws out his thinking: “You have this primal desire to subjugate and possess me,” she says. “It’s very masculine, I think it’s sexy.” Additionally, she finds “his paternalistic beliefs about women charming.” By the end of the novel, Eileen (an editor at a literary magazine) has abandoned her progressive politics, having concluded that what really counts in life is loving Simon and bearing him a child. The professional life she imagined for herself melts into air. She has become the perfect tradwife she described to Simon during their phone sex early in the novel.
Intermezzo offers another illustration of how a woman’s destiny is determined by sexual relations with a man. Ivan and Margaret have sex, and what could have been, and probably should have been, a fun one-night stand, turns into a relationship because they enjoy the sex so much. Ivan, at 22, has only had penetrative sex once before and “it was so awkward and bad that he walked back to his apartment afterwards and literally cried tears.” With Margaret it goes better, and he is immediately smitten. And Margaret, aged 36, who abandoned her drunkard of a husband and hasn’t had sex in two years, falls under his spell—“for the usual animal reasons.” Their affair progresses rapidly, and after more sex they profess their love for each other and Margaret sees “that she might still be salvaged, her body, from the wreck of all her wasted years. In his arms, to be given life … Something miraculous, inexpressible, perfect.”
There is no lack of miracles in Rooney’s work, which is highly if eccentrically Christian, more specifically, Catholic. For example, something miraculous happens to Frances in Conversations With Friends. The novel concludes with Frances wandering into a church. She describes her experience: “I felt that I had understood something … I was aware of something profound.” Rooney doesn’t make us privy to her epiphany but immediately thereafter Frances decides to put herself back under Nick’s control. “Come and get me,” she tells him. In Normal People, Connell performs something of a miracle and grants Marianne grace, redeeming her. Religion also legitimizes and enhances Eileen’s feelings for Simon. After sex one day, she accompanies him to a church service and finds it “strangely romantic.” Religion makes her feel “weak and tender” toward him. By the end of the novel, she has succumbed to his control, pregnant and happy.
Love has the power to make unhappy people happy, as Rooney has remarked about her own love life. In her novels, love does indeed seem to transform people for the better—but the women pay a price. In Rooney’s universe, for women to be saved from self-hate, low self-esteem, shame, or social ostracism, they must place their sexuality in control of the men they love to ensure the men love them. The pleasure produced by sex is transubstantiated into love. To preserve the love and receive grace, the women surrender their autonomy and give the men power over them. Female happiness is attainable only through a male savior (Rooney regularly reminds us that one of her male saviors, Peter, will soon be 33, the same age as Christ when he was crucified).
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that for Rooney the answer to the perennial quandary that sexual desire and its satisfaction poses appears to be, same as it ever was.