The 1966 book “Valley of the Dolls” is perhaps less famous than its 1967 movie adaptation, but in both incarnations, the story is renowned for being pulpy and sensationalist. Jacqueline Susann’s story follows three vastly different young women navigating New York City: show business in the ’40s and ’50s, their dalliances with “dolls” — a loving nickname for the barbiturates they throw back every other page — and their relationships with men. The girls are melodramatic, swapping men, jobs and feuds almost as much as their medications. They throw away the careers and lives they carved for themselves for the men around them. There are countless reviews criticizing the three main characters as naive and ridiculous, but I read the book in high school and loved it. To me, the characters that others called flat and infuriating are staggeringly real.
“You’ve got to climb to the top of Mount Everest
to reach the Valley of the Dolls…
You stand there, waiting for
the rush of exhilaration you thought you’d feel — but
it doesn’t come…
And there’s no place left to climb…”
There’s truly no place left for our girls. The beautiful Jennifer North commits suicide after she learns she has breast cancer, and Neely O’Hara is institutionalized before having an affair with Anne Welles’ husband. The endings of the three main characters, while tragic, felt traceable. You can see the paths that Anne, Neely and Jennifer were set on, the choices that brought them to their places and perhaps which people around them had led them to think the way they did. Despite the implications of this book being described as pulpy, indicating that Susann wasn’t necessarily attempting social commentary, the book feels drenched in awareness of the wrongness of the whole social set-up — fame and womanhood and drugs and love. I didn’t see how this book failed to hold up to the greats in the eyes of the public, just because it was also wildly entertaining.
Maybe, in high school, any kind of complexity or interlocking themes read as deep and truthful and important. Maybe I fell into the spell of the glitz and glamour of the girls’ New York, like a proto-“Sex and the City.” But, I think that the reason I continue to defend this book is the same reason I like Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby,” or why I find myself coming back to “Anna Karenina.” These books engage with the discussion of how much agency female characters actually have, and how they often end up in less than desirable situations because of forces beyond their control, due to their time period. As a result, they make immoral or unethical decisions that modern readers struggle to agree with or understand.
This is also why talking about characters like Daisy with other people is frustrating. So many high schoolers despised Daisy for her inaction, failing to understand that her choice to stay with Tom is what makes the story compelling. If Daisy decided to leave Tom to be with Gatsby, it would only diminish book’s critique of the power that the system has over its characters. Daisy is portrayed as smart, but still beholden to the men in her life. The tragedy of her predicament, maybe making her a little unlikable to modern eyes, is the linchpin of the story. Her sadness serves a purpose, and her misery has a message. She is more fleshed out and like a real person, and shouldn’t be compared to modern standards of how women should act. Characters written in more recent years, like the lead in Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” can be independently terrible seemingly without a reason, embracing their own inaction. This reads as agency to some, but to me, it reads as I imagine “Valley of the Dolls” reads to many: frustrating and obnoxious.
There’s not really a clear-cut answer for what makes “good” female representation, or how it was defined in every era. It’s a question that is odd to even consider. Representation has to strike a delicate balance, rooting a character in reality but also pushing its audience to reconsider their preconceptions. Removing women from not only femininity but also specific experiences of womanhood, in an attempt to push the envelope, is a mark of poorly done representation. Yet, to accurately portray a woman but still not push the character — by challenging her or the audience — is also a dangerous trap.
This is why I feel the need to defend “Valley of the Dolls” against claims of poor writing and vapid characters. The girls in “The Dolls” star in their own stories, but they are also put in uncomfortable situations revolving around their choices and abilities. If one of the goals of the novel more broadly is to poke and prod at the psychological reasons about why people do things, this set-up in “Valley of the Dolls” provides an easy answer. Women are socialized to believe that their worth is tied to their beauty, or that their greatest enemies are women around them, a belief that creates a material barrier to them living their lives as they want — or more accurately, as the modern audience wants them to. It places the onus of determining what women should be doing onto the reader instead of the women themselves. It winds up its toys, places them in a corrupt dollhouse and lets them spin. To show that women can be complex and conflicted as a result of their circumstances — even to be bad at being people sometimes — is much more valuable than portraying women that we compulsively agree with.
Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
