Or Why are Contemporary Fictional Heroines SO Obsessed with Personal Hygiene?
According to Wikipedia, women’s fiction is an umbrella term for women-centred books that focus on women’s life experience and are marketed to female readers. It is distinct from women’s writing, which refers to literature written by (rather than promoted to) women.
The Women’s Fiction Writers’ Association goes further: Our stories may include romance, or they may not. They can be contemporary or historical and have magical, mystery, thriller, or other elements…
If the shelves of Bexhill Library are anything to go by, women’s fiction now includes a peculiarly British sub-genre: cosy-ish crime/mystery in which angst-ridden, middle class, female millennials contend with murderers, rapists, kidnappers and ghosts while at the same time having to cope with ‘stuff’.
This stuff more often than not involves children (usually babies) and, being the nation that we are, house renovation, sometimes both. In The Woman in the Woods by Lisa Hall, a nursing mother has to deal with the supernatural whilst redecorating a quaint old cottage, and in The Couple at No. 9 by Claire Douglas, a pregnant girl discovers two dead bodies under the patio of the house she and her boyfriend are extending.
However, in addition to progeny and property, something else unites the women in this kind of book: an obsession with washing (their bodies, not laundry). The following quote from Sophie Hannah’s Haven’t They Grown is a good example: I’m in the bath, in the dark, with Kiehl’s Lavender, Sea Salts and Aloe Vera bath foam and a few drops of essential lavender oil for good measure to make the scent stronger. (The capital letters are Sophie Hannah’s.)
Further on, our heroine, Beth, says: I go to the bathroom and turn on the light. Good: there’s a bathtub as well as a shower and a little bottle of bubble bath lined up alongside the shampoo and conditioner. A long, hot scented bath should be all I need to make me feel better.
Considering Beth knows she is about to confront an extremely coercive man who is possibly also a child killer, this is a big claim on behalf of soap-based products.
Michaela, the principal character in Melanie Rose’s Down to Earth, does a parachute jump and wakes up six and a half years later. One of her first actions is to take a shower in the home of a male stranger. Come on, did she never see Psycho in her previous life? Safely out of the shower, she visits her partner from pre-parachute days, and finds herself sorting out both his house and his stroppy teenage daughter.
In Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party, Heather, the manager of a Highlands events venue, jumps into a bath just after she has learned there is a murderer on the loose in the surrounding countryside. Heather, however, bucks the progeny/property trend in that she has neither, although one of the paying guests has brought a baby to what proves to be an ill-fated New Year’s Eve gathering.
There’s a fair bit of washing in Lisa Jewell’s The Family Remains (a sequel to The Family Upstairs) – an involved tale of children/later adults raised in a Cheyne Walk mansion now sadly dilapidated but still worth a fortune: She had stood for half an hour in the shower, the pressure turned high, tears mingling with the water as it poured down over her head.
And, She… has a shower, one of those showers that doesn’t make her feel any cleaner, despite the heat of the water and the tang of grapefruit extract in the bodywash. Sorry, what kind of shower would that be?
In The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware, Rowan, a nanny, finds herself in sole charge of four children – one of them just a baby. Her first shower in the ultra-high tech (but seemingly haunted) house in which the story is set takes two and a half pages to describe.
However, it is Neve in Nicci French’s The Lying Room who wins my Cleanest Heroine Award. Admittedly, she is having a stressful time in that she is trying to find out who killed someone called Saul Redfern without revealing to family or friends that she and the murdered man were lovers. She has a husband, three children, one of whom suffers from an eating disorder, a nice London house – with a huge greenhouse that needs to be demolished – and she holds down a full time job.
Surprisingly, she has time for a shower on page 11, a long hot bath on page 137 – so long she watches the skin on her fingers shrivel – another long hot bath on page 200, and a shower on page 238. On page 319, bizarrely, she takes off all her clothes and pops into a small brown river for a solitary swim. Knowing what we now know about Thames Water, this doesn’t sound wise. On page 397 she has yet another shower.
These books are all by good, commercially successful authors, so why this obsession with washing? I know they say write about what you know, but there must be a limit.
Obviously bathing and showering can be seen as a metaphor for clearing one’s mind, wiping the slate clean, making a fresh start, but, more prosaically, it also allows everyone – author, protagonists and reader – to draw breath. As such, it is a useful writerly device, but surely, women are at their most vulnerable when in a shower or bath. The former steams up and the latter is difficult to get out of quickly. Happily, none of our girls has a nasty experience, unlike poor Miss Twye in the poem by Gavin Ewart (1916-1995), a British poet noted for his light verse:
Miss Twye was soaping her breasts in the bath
When she heard behind her a meaning laugh
And to her amazement she discovered
A wicked man in the bathroom cupboard
And talking about men, there seems to be no umbrella term for men-centred books, so it is difficult to do a like for like comparison. However, my gut feeling as a reader of both women’s fiction and ‘bloke lit’ (for want of a better name – think Lee Child and Harlan Coben), is that authors writing for a male readership are less obsessed with their characters’ personal cleanliness. It’s true that Jack Reacher has quite a few showers but only before or during fantastic sex with a highly toned woman.
This obsession with cleanliness seems to chime with, or is inspired by, our current, almost mystical,belief in bathing as therapy: think bubble baths and tea lights, scented oils, glasses of wine within easy reach of the bath, background music, en suites, eye-wateringly expensively fitted bathrooms, and, Heaven help us, baths in the middle of hotel bedrooms (does anyone really like these?). Which leads to the awful realisation, that writers of women’s fiction include all the washing stuff because they think it’s what we want, when actually it’s just an advertiser’s fantasy – a wet dream, if you like.