“Pretty isn’t beautiful, Mother, pretty is what changes. What the eye arranges is what is beautiful.” –Stephen Sondheim, “Sunday in the Park with George”
One would imagine that if in the quest for health, beauty was compromised it would be acceptable. Consider if in the quest for life, your essence as a person became compromised. This horrific situation brings to consciousness what it means to be alive in the face of death, what it means to be human, and ultimately for Jessica Queller, what it means to be a beautiful, feminine woman. Faced with her mother’s stage II breast cancer and then six years after that, facing her mother’s stage IIIC ovarian cancer and death, Jessica was soon hit with another terrifying discovery. She tested positive for the BRCA1 genetic mutation; Jessica had in fact inherited the very genetic disposition that brought upon her mother’s death. In her touching novel, "Pretty is what Changes," she describes if knowledge really is power and how decision to have a mastectomy came to redefine her life, her femininity, and her future.
Being raised by a mother that believed beauty was the most important attribute a woman could have, Jessica and her sister learned to embody, “not that femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine” (De Beauvoir 1265). Jessica said her mother would, “tell [her] how important it was for a woman to have a career, but, she added, a woman also had to be beautiful. ‘All girls are pretty when they’re young,’ she’d say. ‘Once they’re grown up it’s another story. Luckily you and your sister have my genes” (Queller 2). The irony of this statement is of a high emotional caliber when one is presented with the decision Jessica came to face. The very genes that her mother claimed gave Jessica her beauty, were now threatening to eventually take her life in the most violent way, or deprive her of the very things that made her a woman: her ovaries and breasts.
Before Jessica knew about her genetic mutation, before her mother’s untimely death, Jessica saw her mom fight for life. Jessica remembers her mother as, “a willful creature-she’d worked as a fashion designer with her own label for over thirty years among aggressive, conniving men, some of them gangsters. As tough as she was, she had a damsel quality-an elusive aspect that made people want to take care of her” (Queller 13). In Stephanie Queller’s life, playing the role women were expected to play worked in her behalf. She allowed people that wanted to take care of her to give her an advantage, and she understood that, “to decline to be the other, to refuse to be a party to the deal-this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste” (De Beauvoir). This superior caste was of course the conniving men who fell in love with her damsel quality. This damsel was now up against cancer for the second time, and the doctors gave her the grim time span of five years to live, “in fact, she would live less than two” (Queller 20).
Jessica remembers her mother fondly, yet realistically. She says, “My parents were self-made dynamos in their respective careers. They typically came home from work after Danielle and I had already been put to bed by the housekeeper. To make up for this, they devoted weekends to us children” (Queller 25). This didn’t leave much time for interaction between parents and children and it was evident that the need for monetary gain had, “torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and [had] reduced the family to a money relation” (Marx 659). Despite this, Stephanie did her best to create a connection between herself and Jessica. Jessica recognized this, but didn’t appreciate it as a teenager. She says, “My mother’s attention was fixed on exteriors. When I was in high school, she’d devote two hours to setting my thick hair in hot rollers for an audition, yet she would not know the names of my teachers or friends, never mind the name of the play I was trying out for… That was her way of giving-through the material” (Queller 17). This lack of understanding between mother and child lead all the way into Jessica’s adult life where she says, “the only signpost I had was my desire to differentiate myself from my mother” (Queller 28). Jessica didn’t want to become a “model of a real without origin or reality,” (Baudrillard 1557), simply a simulacrum of femininity. She desired individuality.
When Jessica was born, her mother “named [her] Tiffany after Breakfast at Tiffany’s the movie starring Audrey Hepburn. Her [mother’s] name was Stephanie and [Jessica’s] name was Tiffany, and [Stephanie] reveled in telling everyone [they] were exactly alike” (Queller 28). Jessica despised being called Tiffany, and felt she “could not escape the stigma of [her] powder-puff name,” (Queller 29), and so she legally changed it to Jessica. Tiffany came to represent all the things Jessica did not want to be; “the value of [this] term [was] accordingly determined by it’s environment” (Saussure 859). Tiffany wasn’t just identification, it became a representation of “shallow, frivolous women” (Queller 29). The individuality that she fought for her entire life thus far, would fade into the background when she found out her body harbored the same genes that brought breast and ovarian cancer upon her mother.
Once the reality of losing her hair from chemotherapy sunk in, Stephanie “reflectively stroked her pretty, dark mane over and over. Only worse than losing her hair, she said, would be to lose her breasts… To her mind, a little more advanced cancer was far preferable to losing her breasts” (Queller 30). Stephanie Queller with breast cancer was life as usual; despite “nausea, vomiting, mouth sores, or lymphedema, my mother exercised on the StairMaster every weekday morning, got dressed in her Armani suits and Manolos, caught the subway, and was in her designer showroom by nine. When her hair started falling out in clumps, she put on custom-made wigs. She never missed a day of work, scheduling chemo appointments during her lunch hour, and wowed nurses and patients with her spike heels and movie-star clothes” (Queller 31). Stephanie Queller was one who exemplified the claim, “we shall not, then, permit ourselves to be intimidated by the number and violence of the attacks launched against women,” (De Beauvoir), that violent attack being breast cancer.
Stephanie beat breast cancer triumphantly, with her femininity in tact until six years later, “until the age of fifty-eight, when she was struck again – this time with ovarian cancer” (Queller 31). Jessica’s mother was hit harder by this bout of cancer, and Jessica relocated from Los Angeles to New York to live with her, to take care of her. Meanwhile, Jessica was having a secret relationship with her boss, “my new secret romance was having a blissful, drug like effect on me and took the edge off of those long nights. It was a scary kind of drug-like heroin. A crash was inevitable” (Queller 44). Jessica began to define herself in terms of this man, who already had a wife. Jessica’s life at this point was an example of Simone De Beauvoir’s theory that, “man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man” (De Beauvoir). He was her drug,the way to escape the terror of her mothers illness, whereas she was just another girl he could do with or without, since he had another one at home anyway. Soon Jessica realized that Adrian was “a man who would never be good for anyone. You’d think I would have summoned my strength and left him, told him to go back to his wife, his children, his responsibilities. That I did not do” (Queller 48). Of course, Adrian wouldn’t go back to his wife, or his children because he doesn’t see them as directly his responsibilities. His mindset was that, “woman has ovaries and a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature,” (De Beauvoir), and thus he was home free. After enduring Adrian’s last trip to Los Angeles to see his wife, Jessica finally ended things, but not before she allowed herself to be taken advantage of by this man.
When discussing this occurrence with her therapist, Mark, Jessica “described how [she’d] laid down the law with Adrian. Mark listened in silence. When I was through, he took a beat, then asked if I thought I was creating turmoil in my personal life to distract myself from what was going on with my mother” (Queller 49). Mark understood the concept that every utterance is a response to what has come before it and the reply that will come after it (Bakhtin). He then gave the reply that preceded his above statement since Jessica was silent, “your mother is going to die from cancer, Jessica. There is nothing you can do but bear witness” (Queller 49).
Stephanie’s cancer was indeed progressing in a terrible manner. The plan had become to send her home to be in peace because there was no more the hospital could do for her. “In the days before her discharge, my mother sat up in the hospital bed, looking like a wide-eyed little girl. The brutal effects of the surgeries had knocked any worldliness out of her. She no longer had the filter that exists between impression and response” (Queller 67) Since “language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others,” (Saussure 878) bridging the gap between impression and response became impossible. Stephanie couldn’t control the thoughts that come along with the signified/signifier relationship. The immediate connotation of an event, action, or object was what she reacted to. Soon, Stephanie became so sick, so fearful that her “eyes were filled with terror, her mouth frozen in a permanent O. She refused to get near the bed – she equated the bed with death – and insisted on walking” (Queller 78). She might not have been able to filter impressions and responses, but she understood that, “the linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image” (Saussure 852). To her, death was the concept and bed was the sound image.
Being that, “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,” (Burke 459) Stephanie Queller’s defeat in the face of ovarian cancer qualifies. Despite the absolute horror of losing a parent especially in such a dehumanizing condition, it provoked a curiosity in Jessica Queller’s mind. In this way, Stephanie Queller’s passing was sublime as well; “there is nothing so productive of grandeur as noble emotion in the right place. It inspires and possesses our words with a kind of madness and divine spirit” (Longinus 139). This terror, this sadness, this grief is what encourages Jessica to take the BRCA test, and what brought her to writing this moving chronicle of her experience.
Once confronted with the daunting word: positive, Jessica Queller was introduced to the statistics that went along with that word. These “deleterious mutations in BRCA1 may confer as much as an 87% risk of breast cancer and a 44% risk of ovarian cancer by age 70 in women. Mutations in BRCA1 have been reported to confer a 20% risk of a second breast cancer within five years of the first as well as a ten-fold increase in the risk of subsequent ovarian cancer” (Queller 85). Jessica was surrounded by these statistics, a genetic counselor, and the advice to “consider chemoprevention or prophylactic surgery like mastectomy or oophorectomy” (Queller 90). A personal friend of Jessica’s endowed her with more in depth knowledge of what she might have to endure, “ she went on to say that Kim the breast surgeon saw cases of deadly cancer every day and felt it was essential for me to get a bilateral mastectomy as soon as possible. But not to worry – plastic surgery could do marvels these days – I could pick out a lovely new pair of breasts” (Queller 92). From this moment of knowledge on, Jessica would be “haunted by a sense of [her] femininity” (De Beauvoir). When “there is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future,” (De Beauvoir) the difficulty becomes choosing a savior that will delete both sexuality and an element of nurturing in motherhood. When woman “appears essentially to the male as a sexual being and for him; she is sex-absolute sex, no less” (De Beauvoir) the removal of breasts becomes life threatening as well for woman who wants to have a family. Will removing breasts simultaneously remove the possibility of a husband or a family? Being a single woman, Jessica intensely considered this question; she thought, “Maybe I should have waited, say, until forty-five to take the test; that would have given me a decade of blissful ignorance in which to fall in love, have kids, breast-feed…” (Queller 92).
Even doctors were torn about recommending a double mastectomy to a woman who hadn’t yet contracted cancer, who also hadn’t yet contracted a husband or children. One doctor replied, “prophylactic bilateral mastectomy was the gold standard for preventing breast cancer in BRCA-positive women, and that he would strongly advocate it for a woman who was married and had finished bearing children. But for someone like [Jessica], who was single and whose personal life was not yet settled – he couldn’t recommend it in good conscience” (Queller 97). To this doctor, this male professional in the medical field, Jessica was seen as being the other, as simply being a woman who needed to fulfill her duty in life, not a woman whose life could be at risk. He represented the culture that “still widely advertises domestic conceptions of femininity, the ideological moorings for a rigorously dualistic sexual division of labor that casts a woman as chief emotional and physical nurturer” (Bordo 2245). This need for a woman to be the chief emotional and physical nurturer took precedence over the need for a woman to be alive and healthy.
It took Jessica a year to decide if she should have the life altering surgery or not. She questioned, “If I had a mastectomy and reconstruction, would men no longer find me desirable? Would I feel deformed? Would I ever want to be touched again? Would I no longer feel like a whole woman?” (Queller 113). Jessica was so haunted by these questions because “particularly in the realm of femininity, where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance of various norms and practices, we need an analysis of power ‘from below’ as Foucault puts it; for example, of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate – rather than repress – desire, generate and focus out energies, construct our conceptions of normalcy and deviance” (Bordo 2242). The debate between normalcy and health raged on.
When Jessica decides that waking up without breasts is “the lesser of two evils and [that she’ll] be more traumatized if [she] woke up with cancer” (Queller 152) she also realizes that “at the farthest extremes, the practices of femininity may lead [her] to utter demoralization, debilitation, and death” (Bordo 2241). Despite the fact that, “our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, and femininity” (Bordo 2240) none of those things matter when one realizes that “Having surgery is taking care of myself. My true self. My spirit, my character, stuff on the inside. Whatever the cosmetic result of my body, my breasts, is not all that consequential” (Queller 195). In this way, Jessica is living the essence of the Rene des Cartes’ Cogito. Without the essence of herself, her character, her life, she would not truly exist. Her ability to think makes her human, makes her woman, and makes her Jessica.
Post double mastectomy, Jessica reminisced on her feelings about the surgery; “I was afraid I’d feel deformed, afraid I wouldn’t feel at home in my reconstructed body, afraid that my sexual partners would find me unappealing. Afraid that somehow the physical and emotional consequences of my choice would sabotage my ability to find love. None of this turned out to be the case” (Queller 226). Jessica still wanted to fulfill her role as a woman, but first she had to experience that “cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on the body, understood as a medium, indeed, a blank page; in order for this inscription to signify, however, that medium must itself be destroyed – that is, fully transvaluated into a sublimated domain of values” (Bordo 2543). She had to assess her breasts for their true value, and see if they were truly attached to future love, children, family life, and ultimately womanhood. Once detached from her breasts, it became possible to see them as simply breasts, not as the inscriptions that were written on them.
A transformation of the ideals of beauty occurred. Through her mother’s cancer struggles and death, through her own journey from BRCA1 test to mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, Jessica came to truly understand what it meant to be a woman in this modern day society. She found that “through the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity – a pursuit without a terminus, requiring that women constantly attend to minute and often whimsical changes… female bodies become docile bodies – whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, ‘improvement’” (Bordo 2241) but also that if one takes their destiny into their own hands, they can absolutely rewrite it.
Jessica Queller defamiliarizes what it means to be a woman. In this way, she is refusing to accept the notion that women must put themselves in danger and risk their health in order to live up to the standards society has placed on them; that they must attract men sexually, they must produce and nurture children, and that they must be perfect and pretty. She exemplifies the theory that, “today’s female writer feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitively emerging” (Gilbert and Gubar 1930). She creates a source of comfort and advice for women experiencing the same decision, and a source of inspiration and self-assuredness for all women to believe in who they are and accept their feminine characteristics, while not settling for less in life because of them.
“We are living in an age in which scientific advances give us new opportunities to live. Seize them.” – Jessica Queller
Works Cited
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Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. Second Edition . W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2010, 2001. Print.
Burke, Edmund. "Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful" Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.
De Beauvoir, Simone. "The Second Sex Introduction: Woman as Other." Web. 9 Aug. 2010.http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm
De Beauvoir, Simone. “From The Second Sex.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. Second Edition. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2010, 2001. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. "Madwoman in the Attic." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. Second Edition. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 2010, 2001. Print.
Longinus, Cassius. "On Sublimity." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.
Marx, Karl. "The Communist Manifesto." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.
Queller, Jessica. Pretty Is What Changes: Impossible Choices, the Breast Cancer Gene, and How I Defied My Destiny. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009. Print.
Saussure, Ferdinand. "Course in General Linguistics" Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010, 2001. Print.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdMUGziS2Kc&NR=1
