Television’s Unruly Woman: How Fleabag Defies the Norms of Femininity
[A woman in her mid-thirties stands in a doorway in front of her father] ‘I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.’
From episode one of Fleabag’s first season, the audience cannot help but be instantly invested. Written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag’s eponymous, problematic and complex protagonist draws us in, encapsulating both hilarity and heartbreak in the twenty-something minutes of each episode. Loud and outrageous, Fleabag’s life revolves around failed relationships, ill-advised sexual encounters, and her crumbling café business. She is grief-stricken from the loss of her mother and best friend and is unreservedly unruly in her transgression of the socially accepted norms of femininity. To deem Waller-Bridge’s character simply an ‘anti-heroine’ — as she has been so often in the past — somewhat evades her dichotomous character and mischievous charisma. She is simultaneously loveable and utterly unlikeable. But one thing is for sure — Fleabag is chaos personified; mayhem wrapped in a black trench coat and finished with red lipstick. Her unruliness is precisely her appeal.
It’s easy to synonymise on-screen feminism with representations that depict ‘successful’ women — both the show and its protagonist are acutely aware of this. This is perhaps why Fleabag consistently questions whether she is a ‘bad feminist’. With her career and relationships being tumultuous at best, she uses sex as a method of, in her words, deflecting from the ‘screaming void inside [her] empty heart.’ Her failures in work, love, and friendships collectively create an image of a woman who is not succeeding in the way that society believes she should. It is in her supposed failures, however, that we can relate to Fleabag. She’s imperfect, unruly, and entirely outrageous. The programme’s feminism lies precisely in these assets and their problematisation of the social and cultural norms of femininity.
Fleabag’s sly side glances and direct addresses to the camera are vital in creating much of the show’s humour, but also in establishing and nurturing a connection between actor and audience. It is through these breaks in the fourth wall that the viewer is persuaded to emote and emphasise with her. In one scene, Fleabag visits a therapist (played by Fiona Shaw) who asks her ‘do you have friends?’. Fleabag turns to the camera with a knowing smile, explicitly validating the viewers as her friends; they have no choice but to side with her because they have become the recipients of her secrets and private confessions.
On-screen representations of gender have long been entrenched in the concept of the patriarchal male gaze. Laura Mulvey’s famous essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) coins the phrase. In short, Mulvey’s theory explores the image of the female in the media as viewed from the perspective of the heterosexual man, highlighting the female’s passivity and objectification. Once you notice the male gaze in film, television, and advertising, it is entirely inescapable. Fleabag’s subversion of the male gaze is refreshing and almost parodical in its commentary on the longstanding patriarchal dynamics of ‘looking’. The programme’s charming use of direct address intensifies Fleabag’s female gaze by creating a female-dominated point of view. When Fleabag falls for a priest (affectionately named the ‘Hot Priest’ by the internet) brilliantly played by Andrew Scott, the show’s subversion of the male gaze comes into play. We side with Fleabag as she gazes at her new love interest, ‘his neck… his beautiful neck!’. Waller-Bridge’s commentary here is brimming with satire; in destabilising normative gender dynamics, she shines a light on the misogyny of the male gaze. Refreshingly, the programme functions as a space where a female agency is not only permitted, but encouraged, and its protagonist’s fierce autonomy over her own life and narrative epitomises feminism at its most basic level. Fleabag manages to be politically aware without losing its humour. Waller-Bridge clearly understands the contradictory aspects of contemporary feminism and exploits these in comical ways. Episode one sees Fleabag and her sister, Claire, attend a feminist lecture titled ‘Women Speak: Opening Woman’s Mouths since 1988’ and two episodes later we see the two at an all-female silent retreat called ‘Breath of Silence: Women Don’t Speak.’ The dichotomy is stark and satirizes the elements of confusion around feminism in today’s society; it seems that quiet, abiding women are not feminists, but neither are loud rebellious ones.
My praise is not to suggest that Fleabag solves the existing issues of gender representation on screen — whilst its feminist agenda is progressive and positive, the programme’s depiction of women is only applicable to a small subsection. For Fleabag to be deemed a voicing of the collective female experience is perhaps problematic. The middle-to-upper-class white women that drive the show’s narrative reflect only one type of feminism, emphasising the need for representation, both on and off-screen, for that which reaches beyond white feminism. But at its heart, Fleabag’s story is compelling because it is entirely her own. Full of the flaws and contradictions of being a woman, her narrative is both progressive and relatable. As Waller-Bridge put it in an interview with The Cut, “this is a show about the glory of being a woman, and in the glory of being a woman, the darker bits are involved.”
