Cleopatra and Frankenstein: The Female Muse, the Male Gaze & All My Internalised Misogyny
Coco Mellors explores what it means to be adored in her wonderful debut novel.
Due to being mildly insane, I often find myself experiencing depersonalisation and derealisation. I sometimes find it hard to truly feel as if I belong anywhere, that reality is happening far away from me and that I am floating on the outside looking in.
I sometimes feel like I am living my life in a haze of misunderstanding or as if there is a secret to existing that nobody will let me in on.
I spend so much of my time struggling to understand myself that I often forget that those around me form their own perceptions and opinions about me.
This comes at a horrifying realisation at random and often unfortunate moments, and sometime I am convinced we all remember and panic over at one point or another.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein is Coco Mellors debut novel and wrapped up in the central love story she plays with this idea that we have no control over how others perceive us and how this then effects how we feel about ourselves.
Cleo meets Frank while she’s living in New York and the connection is instant and insatiable. Despite Frank being twenty years her senior, the pair quickly marry to secure her green card and their love story begins in a blur of champagne, parties and interfering friends.
Despite their passionate love for one another, Cleo and Frank grapple with reality and the fantasy that they so badly want to live out.
A life of art, beauty and fashion is slipping from their grasp as Cleo finds herself pulled in the various directions of the men in her life and Frank must face the reality of being in love with someone who cares about how his behaviour affects them.
Don’t Make Me Your Muse: Cleo’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl Curse
Cleo’s personality is presented through the eyes of her many adoring friends and therefore it can be difficult to get a clear idea of who she really is.
That is until she begins to embrace the darker parts of herself and her fragile mental health, falling victim to depression and thus giving the reader a glimpse of Cleo at her most vulnerable, and perhaps her most authentic.
The reaction of those around her is incredibly telling, the reader is able to note just who see’s Cleo for who she is and mourns the loss of joy in her life right alongside her, and those that see Cleo as an extension of their ego or a fantasy in which she no longer plays her part.
While characters like Frank and Anders are no great artistic creators, they do behave as if Cleo is some kind of otherworldly muse in their life.
She is their Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the ultimate untouchable desire. Even Frank, who marries Cleo, describes her as someone he will never completely know or have.
“Cleo’s like a cat,” said Frank. “She can touch you, but you can’t touch her. That’s her thing.”
One could argue that Frank declares Cleo a mystery that won’t be solved because that means he doesn’t really have to try and do so. He doesn’t have to deal with the Cleo that doesn’t match up with his fantasy of her because he has already decided that she wont let him.
Anders is no different, not really. He fetishises Cleo in a way that cannot possibly bring either of them any true happiness. He uses Frank as an excuse not to pursue his romantic feelings for her but in a way that just plays into the fantasy he has created for himself and his version of Cleo.
She is the forbidden fruit, the princess that he can’t help but want to rescue. In his fantasy, Cleo is with the wrong man and she is the only woman that could possibly change his playboy ways.
Yet when given the opportunity, Anders runs away from the reality of life with Cleo. How can he pine after her and justify his life of one night stands and expensive wine if he actually ends up having her?
Knowing that we have no real control over how others perceive us is a living nightmare and one that makes me want to crawl into a shell and remain a bland mystery to those around me.
Cleo suffers such a reality but with the added difficulty of being unsure of her own identity also. Cleo spends much of her own story at a loss to herself and anchors herself to Frank in an attempt to belong somewhere.
Being so unsure of herself, afraid of who she truly might be, means that it is all too easy for her to get wrapped up in how her friends see her, how they want her to play a part in their own story and she suffers at the hands of such tedium.
Cleo vs Eleanor: Internalised Misogyny and Reading Myself to Filth
It was only approximately halfway through the book that I realised I had fallen into an old pattern I had hoped not to repeat.
From the very beginning, I took an instant disliking to Cleo’s character. From her stunning beauty to her quick witted comebacks, her often childlike sense of wonder to her razor sharp tongue.
I couldn’t understand what was so incredibly irresistible about Cleo or what made these characters so mad in their lust for her. I found her behaviour twee or predictable, unrealistic in her representation of femininity and womanhood.
It had not occurred to me for sometime that I was indulging in a knee-jerk reaction of misplaced judgement and misogyny. I realised that the times wherein which I felt such distaste for Cleo were also the times where Cleo is presented through the experience of the men around her.
Whether it were Frank, Anders or even Santiago, their versions of Cleo were always so overwhelmingly sickly in their adoration that I couldn’t help but inwardly cringe at how annoying she felt to me.
Comparing this to my reaction to Eleanor’s character, who we know to be less conventionally attractive compared to Cleo, who is witty and intelligent and whose life we experience through her own voice, she instantly became a favourite character.
I realised that it was no coincidence that I took a disliking to Cleo’s character when seen from the eyes of our male characters.
It’s a pattern that I’ve noticed before and it can only come from some residual internalised misogyny wherein which I have judged both Cleo and Eleanor by what I perceive to be the correct representation of a female character.
Where the male characters consistently praise Cleo for her various attractive and desired qualities, they also often portray her as somewhat fragile and even frivolous, Eleanor is represented as a woman to take seriously because we so rarely experience her from a male point of view.
Mellors plays with representation and uses the supporting characters to develop Cleo’s story, showing the reader how the ways in which men see her has affected the way she see’s herself, and might influence the judgements made by her readers also.
Perhaps one could determine this to be just a personal realisation and admittance of unfair judgement and bias towards female characters but I would argue that it is a reaction more common that we realised and one sophistically explored by Mellors.
Love Will Tear Us Apart
Despite the ways in which Mellors’ characters may struggle to truly see each other and find themselves at a loss to their own misperceptions, Cleopatra and Frankenstein is still very much a love story, a painful one, which tend to be my favourite kind.
Cleo and Frank love each other and that is what makes their misunderstanding of each other so difficult to watch unfold. Their union unravels as they discover themselves and evolve while moving away from each other.
“When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.”
Mellors weaves such beautiful prose and musings on love throughout the narrative. True love can exist between those that are not meant for each other eternally and it does not make it any less difficult to detach oneself from such a relationship.
There comes a point where Frank and Cleo simply do not want to come back to each other, their will to make it work has run out and surely that’s how one reaches the point where love just isn’t enough.
They have reached a state of exhaustion, in their lives apart and their life together, and it’s clear that a kind of love still exists between them, it may always exist, but their missing each other is perhaps only superficial.
They miss elements of one another or what their life once looked like but Frank does not truly miss Cleo’s authentic self and Cleo has never known Frank at his best, not really.
The kind of true, melancholic missing of another human is something that sits upon your chest as if stone is stored between your ribs.
You ache for their presence, to simply be in their company, silent and in the dark, soaking up the energy they bring and the way it calms a restless mind.
That’s where love lives on and in the missing them there is something to hold on to, a kind of hope or simply the want to come back to them again and again.
Frank and Cleo’s story feels a lot like the loss of that kind of love. The kind of love you cannot shake, the kind you always want to come back to.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein is a great read for those looking to lose themselves in a love story this summer. It’s a book to be read on grassy hills or sun drenched park benches.
It’s a story that will stay with you as you walk in the warm wind of summer’s late sunsets. Tuck it away for the warmer months and enjoy!