Collateral Damage: The Feminist Work of Joan Didion’s Last Novels

Abstract

In her fiction, Joan Didion crafted female protagonists who embodied the strange stirrings documented by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, as common among mid-century White, educated women. Didion’s protagonists are all daughters, wives, and mothers who come to realize their lives are built on empty compromises. However, in her late 20th-century novels, their awareness leads to actual changes: the Didion Women who confront the void in Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted find their lives impacted by the machinations of U.S. Cold War policies. These novels specifically trace the impact of American imperialism on wives and daughters at home—those that the policies claimed to protect. These protagonists, and their witnesses, refuse to be passive casualties. Their narration by an embedded professional female journalist adds weight to the journeys of these overlooked women. Through her protagonists of privilege, Didion unflinchingly documents the physical and psychological damages of patriarchy—both personal and political—presenting female models of awareness and resistance. This essay will examine Didion’s Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted as the capstones of her woman-centered fiction, presenting detailed portraits of matrons who deliberately disentangle themselves from history.

1. Introduction

Betty Friedan opens The Feminine Mystique (Friedan 1963) with this description: “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States” (p. 1). These dissatisfied women align with critic Kakutani’s (1996) description of “the Didion woman” (the protagonist found in her novels) as the forlorn resident of “a clearly personal wasteland, wandering along highways or through countries in an effort to blot out the pain of consciousness.” In other words, Didion crafted female protagonists who embodied the yearnings described by Friedan as common among mid-century White, educated women. Significantly, the first Didion Woman appeared in her debut novel Run River (Didion 1963)—published the same year as Friedan’s seminal work.

This synchronicity between Friedan and the fiction of Joan Didion may be surprising since in 1972, Didion infamously wrote “The Women’s Movement” for the New York Times, cataloging what she saw as its weak foundation and objectives: “To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis may have seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism” (p. 2). However, as context, she leveled parallel critiques at the youth movement and Civil Rights. In these separate essays, she generally questioned their rhetoric and limited goals—not their grievances. Douthat’s (2022) provocative “Try Canceling Joan Didion” notes how 21st-century fans try to “forgive” Didion’s earlier conservativism by privileging her later shift. However, Douthat responds that this defense requires discounting Didion’s most interesting and insightful work. He instead argues that her writing “actually reflects a continuity … [of] her coolness to enthusiasm and utopianism.” Consistently, her problem is with movements; what she does believe in is honest questioning.

Douthat’s less polarizing assessment may be more appropriate in situating Joan Didion’s writing—in particular her novels—within the feminist canon. Overall, Didion does not resemble stereotypical conservatives—such as novelist Ayn Rand, whose novels featured male protagonists who championed laissez-faire capitalism. Instead, Noriko (2018) connects Didion to another iconoclast, Sylvia Plath: “it is rarely a woman protagonist that undergoes the shock of discovery of the void, combats its silence and attempts to go beyond the reality of nothingness” (p. 71).1 The Didion Woman not only confronts this void but also moves beyond its confines. Als (2019) similarly observes that Didion’s early novels “embodied the second-wave White feminism that mattered to me as well,” serving as feminist work “without having to declare itself as such.” Didion’s protagonists are daughters, wives, and mothers who come to realize their lives are built on empty compromises. Significantly in her last novels, their awareness leads to actual changes.

These Didion Women confronting the void in Democracy (Didion 1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (Didion 1996) recognize that their lives are impacted by the machinations of U.S. Cold War policies. Worden (2020) describes Didion’s fiction, like her nonfiction, offering “experiential guides to U.S. culture and U.S. international entanglements in the late twentieth century, from San Francisco, Malibu, and Miami to Bogota, San Salvador, and Saigon” (p. 44). Therefore, her last novels feature not only the “strange stirring” of a Didion Woman, but also more specifically trace the impact of American imperialism on wives and daughters at home—those that the policies claimed to protect. However, these protagonists and their witnesses refuse to be passive casualties.

This essay will examine Didion’s Democracy (Didion 1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (Didion 1996) as the capstones of her woman-centered fiction, complementing and developing ideas present in her nonfiction. While her previous protagonists may have taken actions to “to blot out the pain of consciousness,” her last novels go further, presenting detailed portraits of matrons who deliberate disentangle themselves from history. These protagonists achieve an awareness not just of themselves but of the political machinations that their lives have been built on. These novels are also both narrated by an embedded professional female journalist—which adds weight to the actions of these overlooked women. Through her protagonists of privilege, Didion unflinchingly documents the physical and psychological damages of patriarchy—both personal and political—presenting female models of awareness and resistance.

2. Sketching Political Landscapes

Despite the lack of critical focus on these novels, Democracy (Didion 1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (Didion 1996) reflect Didion’s “deeper skepticism about …American patterns of exclusion and oppression” (Douthat 2022) that began with the Reagan presidency. Not coincidentally, these novels coincide with Didion’s research and publication of nonfiction Salvador (Didion 1983) and Miami (Didion 1987). Harred (1998) examines Salvador’s critique of U.S. policy, observing “the distanced, dispassionate, impartial view of the situation in El Salvador” with solutions crafted elsewhere (p. 3). She cites Didion’s (1983) characterization of the government’s obfuscating language as “pervasive obscenity” (p. 65), abstract designations that support the U.S. Embassy’s distanced attitudes (Harred 1998, p. 3). While Didion’s previous nonfiction books were collections of previously published essays, these two works followed her deliberate investigations of the intersecting geographies that justified Washington’s Cold War policies.

Therefore, it is not a coincidence that her later novels, beginning with The Book of Common Prayer (Didion 1977), feature protagonists who are unable to ignore their position within the military-industrial complex. As Worden (2020) notes, “The interconnectedness of her fiction and nonfiction shatters any conventional literary taxonomy that would make a distinction between the real and the imaginative, the journalistic and the novelistic” (p. 44). Coinciding with her critique of the false distance between foreign policy and the domestic, she likewise criticizes journalism’s ability to follow the fragmented and obscured details of any event. However, Bachner (2011) notes that, unlike her contemporary novelists who believed that there was a “sublime beyond language worth seeking” (p. 6), Didion focused on “uncovering the material bases of our social production” (p. 7) over any “truth.”

For Didion, this material basis of production includes the wives and families of Cold War actors. Throughout Democracy, Didion presents the tangled commercial, political and government interests of her characters. Her protagonist Inez Victor reflects on the implications of her U.S. citizenship:

her passport did not excuse her from what she characterized to me as “the long view.” By “the long view” I believe she meant history, or more exactly the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it, that Inez’s experience had tended to deny.

(Didion 1984, p. 211)

Inez acknowledges that her passport makes her complicit in her country’s history, while giving her the privilege to escape its borders. Her marriage to a politician contributes both to her privilege and her complicity. As Loughran (2013) notes, Didion’s last two novels “collapse the distinction between literary plots and those cooked up for clandestine purposes… these novels map the normative binary of feminine/masculine onto the paranoid surface/depth model of geopolitical subterfuge” (p. 423). Didion’s move to political thrillers highlights this intersection between the domestic and global theater.

Democracy’s Inez Christian Victor2 embodies the intersection of two dynasties and their spheres of influence: Pacific Rim capitalism and U.S. politics (both of which depend on the military and CIA for their interests). These factions all converge in Honolulu when Inez’s father Paul, a trust-fund dilettante, shoots her sister Janet and a Nisei Congressman during the last days of the Vietnam War. As Parrish (2006) observes, “Didion focuses on Inez, as if the author identifies with Inez’s seeming superfluity. Actually, Didion identifies with Inez because hers is the story Didion is best able to tell” (p. 175). Parrish recognizes that Inez is like the women that Didion was educated with, wrote about at Vogue, or invited to dinner parties.

As Didion later investigated the geography of El Salvador, she previously uncovered the politics beneath the veneer of paradise of Hawaii. Though Didion was unsuccessful in getting her editors to send her to Vietnam, she published magazine essays from her family Hawaiian stays. “In the Islands” is a series of entries about her existential crisis—observing rich tourists, Hawaiian dynasties, military history, and the burial of soldiers—with no clear thesis, just lingering impressions. However, beyond her view from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, her writing mapped the history of war and imperialism beyond the beaches: “the largest part of its population interprets war, however unconsciously, as a force for good, and instrument of social progress” (Didion 1968, p. 197). This rich landscape that Didion unearthed made Hawaii her perfect stage for the results of American political, imperialistic and social policies.

The Christian dynasty embodies these intersecting interests. The Christians are a landowning family in Hawaii (currently led by her uncle), who have used the islands as a base to pursue commercial interests in the Pacific Rim. Not coincidentally, Hawaii served as a base for U.S. Cold War operations in the Pacific, most notably Vietnam. After a youthful affair with CIA agent Jack Lovett, Inez became the wife of Harry Victor, a future New York senator and presidential candidate (while Inez remains in contact with Lovett). The intersecting men and factions of her life have unintentional consequences not just for Inez, but more seriously for her mother, her sister, and her daughter. Though their men may dismiss their wives and daughters as window-dressing, these female characters suffer from the “particular undertow” of history felt by Inez.

Alan Nadel and Janis Stout both chose Joan Didion’s Democracy as the closing chapters of their American cultural studies volumes—verifying Didion’s achievement. Stout (1998) sees Didion’s central point in Democracy as “that public affairs and private life impinge on each other and are, in fact, inseparable” (p. 217). Marital infidelity and self-destructive teenagers are not only a domestic result of public affairs, but they likewise impinge on public affairs, creating crises that need to be fixed.

Echoing Stout, Nadel (1995) likewise recognizes how Democracy refuses to accept the convenient fictions that Cold War and capitalistic maneuverings kept Americans at home safe and untouched. As he describes, “the novel assaults the power of fictional containment. …undermining of the historical narrative by the person and the personal by the historical” (p. 275). As in Salvador, Didion rejects the distanced and impartial view separating U.S. involvement from U.S. soil. Instead, Didion uniquely captured, “motifs of the national narrative [that are] performatives, or perhaps more precisely as failed performatives” (Nadel 1995, p. 276). With Democracy, Didion connected the imperialism of Hawaii to 1980 U.S. Cold War stagings as well as her awareness of the wives and daughters pressed into their service. However, despite Nadel and Stout’s recognition of Democracy, its centrality to Didion’s accomplishments is no longer secure. Its connection to The Last Thing He Wanted has been explored little.

Shifting decades and geography with her subsequent novel, The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion combines the circuitous route of a journalist’s investigation with a postmodern narrative, evoking the indeterminate world of U.S. covert operations. The focus of this conspiracy and its subsequent investigation is an attempted assassination—as the operators find more meat in the uncertainties raised by an attempt as more substantial than the removal of any one person. The patsy for the attempt is Elena McMahon, a Southern Californian divorcee—who has become the scapegoat for her father. As a young woman, she made a comfortable marriage to escape the undertow of her father’s deals as an arms middleman. Unfortunately, Elena reached a point in her marriage where security was no longer worth her loss of self, so she walked away to become a political journalist. However, like the Christian women of Democracy, Elena cannot escape the undertow of her own or U.S. history.

Though her protagonists are quite distinct, Didion’s last three novels share a similar structure: a formerly privileged woman leaves her comfortable married life, instead electing to face the inconvenient truths of her position. Stout (1998) includes Didion in her study of female authors who follow protagonists’ escape from home—but for the Didion Women, it is “a movement into the political, or …the politicized historical” (p. 190). However, Democracy marks the first novel where the Didion Woman demonstrates “successful loyalties and purposeful lives” (Henderson 1989, p. 70). Didion speaks for these women who observe more than they speak. In her own fashion, Didion’s novels confirm the validity of these privileged women’s “strange stirring,” while underlining the complexities of any real solution—a feminism adjacent to, if not part of, a movement.

Though Didion places a love story at the center of these novels, the style and the tone are not romantic: no one lives or dies in service of anything noble. Instead, the characters settle for sacrifice, allowing a scrap of morality, a scrap of choice, for characters caught in history—history kept in motion by political and corporate deals made and supported by the men who supposedly loved them.

3. Writing Women Who Write Women

These novels’ critique of Cold War machinations is enhanced by Didion’s structure. To narrate the lives of the politicized Didion Woman, Didion deliberately crafted an approach that drew on the style found in her nonfiction. The female narrators of Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted may succeed in documenting the collateral damage of political intrigue that invalidates the domestic contract used to justify these actions. Unfortunately, these narrators find it more challenging to fulfill their primary objective—to speak for these women, who declined to speak for themselves.

The awarding of Joan Didion’s 2012 National Medal of Arts begins with “for her mastery of style in writing” (Obama 2013). And it is her style that critics and readers alike focus on in discussions of her writing—nonfiction and fiction. As Chris Anderson (1987) describes, “She lies low in her writing, looks hard at America to discover the pictures that shimmer, the images that resonate. She stays quiet, allowing the pictures in her mind to develop their own shapes and grammars” (p. 133). Yet Didion did not develop style for the sake of style. In interviews, she describes her discomfort with following a more direct (masculine) rhetoric, declining to approach her subjects with an argument or judgment. Her personal voice was not merely joining New Journalism but her methods developed from her first assignments at Vogue—in her writing, the personal and the political were always linked.

As Didion avoids sentimentalism and tidy conclusions in her essays, she likewise does not find it easy to narrate the “yearning for ‘fulfillment’ or ‘self expression’” (Didion 1972, p. 1) of her protagonists. She instead allows her fictional protagonists to shimmer, without defining them: Steigman (2016) describes her “epigrammatic, even incomplete fictional style” (p. 597), which makes any feminist stance challenging to locate. Didion explained her approach to her A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy protagonists: “I had a very clear picture in my mind of both those women, but I couldn’t tell the story without standing way far away” (Didion 2006). Telling their story honestly, rather than making her point, was key to these novels’ structure. Therefore, Didion embedded female narrators within her last three novels who use an investigative process to create images of the protagonists—incomplete portraits crafted as mosaics. These narrators are committed to documenting these protagonists’ break from their privileged pasts, declining to paint them as victims even if victimized.

As with political movements, Didion is also an uneasy member of American literary movements, more likely to say what her writing is not than to embrace a clear designation. Nelson (2017) argues that Didion’s “ironic skepticism, sometimes verging on contempt for the counterculture… departs tonally and emotionally from her fellow New Journalists” (p. 148). Here Nelson notes that Didion’s skepticism not only distanced her from second-wave feminists but also from her more liberal-minded male peers. Perhaps more importantly, while Wolfe, Capote and Mailer examined exceptional (if infamous) men, Didion more often preferred the female figures in the background, like Patty Hearst, Linda Kasabian (driver for Charles Manson), Jessica Savitch, and Quintana Dunne—women who did not escape the “undertow of having and not having,” women not unlike her novel’s protagonists.

In parallel, her fictional narrators investigate without sentimentality the personal and political responsibility that drives the protagonists of her later novels. Through her narrators’ investigations, Didion attempts to bring into focus her female protagonists who defy narrative, but whose stories are relevant to understanding history: “the evasive practices of national security are made analogous with the very conditions of [her protagonists’] desire: namely, feminine self-expressions and self-preservation born of an audacious refusal to speak” (Loughran 2013, p. 426). Her novels make visible the lives of privileged yet silenced women who were used to justify the hidden actions of public men.

The female characters who narrate Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted are not only professional journalists but also friendly acquaintances of the protagonists. Blurring conventional boundaries, Didion’s embedded narrators are attracted by the sudden shifts of their protagonists. They research the intersections of family and political history which the protagonist could no longer ignore—acknowledging how their “privileged” lives were used to justify continual compromises.

These narrators were lured to their investigation less by the tabloid intrigues than by the enigmatic woman at the center. The narrator of Democracy is “Joan Didion,” an editor for Vogue who has long followed the public life of Inez Christian Victor, wife and hostess of a New York senator and presidential hopeful. Nadel (1995) sees the use of “Didion” as key, since a more confident authorial voice would have worked against the project of Democracy: “assert[ing] the traditional power of the author thus means denying the requisite conditions of democracy—limited power and complete culpability” (p. 291). Though “Joan Didion” narrates Democracy, neither narrator “Didion” nor author Didion creates an authoritative narrative.

Instead of Democracy’s metafiction, The Last Thing He Wanted chooses instead an unnamed narrator3, who is in many ways a double for the protagonist Elena McMahon. The narrator met Elena while their daughters were at school together, so like Elena, this narrator may have put her journalism career on the backburner for (privileged) motherhood. The narrator also resembles Joan Didion—she observed Elena at an Academy Awards banquet, and her writing assignments took her to the Caribbean embassy and to El Salvador (all places where Didion had been).

In solving the puzzle of Elena, the narrator (like “Didion”) reports that she is pulling from a combination of personal encounters, interviews, newspaper accounts, and declassified governments—all from the vantage point of more than a decade later. As the narrator tells the reader what she has found, sharing her interviews with the survivors, she remains unnamed. The second chapter opens with “For the record this is me talking. You know me, or think you do. The not quite omniscient author. No longer moving fast. No longer moving light” (Didion 1996, p. 5). The narrator tells enough about herself to establish her credentials, without creating a character that would interfere with the subject at hand: Elena and the machinations that claimed her life. This authoritative anonymity allows this narrator to lie low as she collects the images of Elena’s erratic journeys toward the authentic—an ethical awakening that does not depend on actual change to be worthwhile.

Consistently, the narrator in The Last Thing He Wanted avoids filling in the blanks in Elena’s story: “I am resisting narrative here” (p. 113). Avenging Elena is not about making accusations on her behalf but instead about making Elena fully visible—free of the “official reports”—for the reader to draw their own conclusions. This absence of coherent narrative connects The Last Thing He Wanted to Democracy. As Nadel (1995) observes, “Didion’s Democracy not only exposes the personal and national cost of propagating America’s colonialist narrative but also investigates both the author’s and the reader’s complicity in the narrative by attacking the conventional boundaries between reader and text, fact and fiction” (p. 280). If the narrators created a clear explanation and conclusion, they would be as culpable as those who created the false narratives around Janet, Inez or Elena, since “any solution would doubtless be banal and highly problematic” (Levesque 1998, p. 78). Presenting the details of these women and the traps laid for them is the moral hardness that Didion calls for, denying any comfort that democracy or love might offer in justifying the human and ethical costs.

Since the narrator of The Last Thing He Wanted is unable to make any sense of Elena’s death, she resists letting go of Elena’s brief love affair with Treat, closing by imaging them together—a conclusion that undermines the journalist’s investigation. Peters (2016) decodes this “counterfactual” ending, by connecting it to Didion’s postmodern literary references, including T.S. Eliot. This imagined ending reveals the narrator as human rather than unprofessional, allowing her desire for the sublime “to misapprehend or even distort political and historical realities… [of] an illicit arms deal between the United States and Nicaraguan guerrilla fighters” (p. 62). But the reality remains that Elena died, publicly accused of attempting to assassinate operative Treat Morrison.

Didion’s fictional protagonists embody the unintended effects on those at home, attacking the fictions of national boundaries, together presenting the collateral cost to American society—past and present—from indirect, off-shore violence. Mallon (1980) assesses the trajectory of the Didion Woman: “the vague ‘optimism’ these women initially possess is based on ignorance and evasion of their own pasts. …The past comes calling in each of the novels” (p. 46). Essentially, the narrators document these protagonists’ honest confrontations with their past, accepting responsibility for their past evasions. Their personal atonement is more important than any truth or resolution.

4. Resisting the Undertow of Careless Men

The excuse “the last thing he wanted” hangs over the narratives of Didion’s novels, not just the one that bears that title. Overall, the Didion husbands, fathers, and lovers may not intend any damage to the female characters within her novels. In fact, they believed that their work would create a better life—and perhaps a better world—for the women in their care. However, this does not mean that their amoral professional actions are excusable. Didion’s work follows their acts’ unintended connections and consequences—the undertows that the female characters have only mixed results in escaping. Effects may be apparent, but the cause remains conjecture.

The fathers and husbands of Inez and Elena attempted to balance their international lives of violence with domestic lives of tranquil affluence, believing their families were “untouched” by their professional actions, particularly those that occurred beyond US borders. Nadel (1995) describes America’s period of containment: “Distance has been the privilege of postwar Americans” (p. 219). Didion’s novels refute this belief in “distance,” this false separation of the domestic from offshore violence; her “narrative theory of complicity set the terms for her critique of US engagements” (Steigman 2016, p. 600). Didion’s American protagonists adrift in history are all upper-class matrons, whom a reader might expect would be sheltered from material consequences of political intrigue—yet their complicity makes them vulnerable.

Significantly, Democracy opens in a flashback, establishing the historical and geographic context for the novel’s action. Inez and Jack Lovett are enjoying the strange skies created by nuclear testing—an image that does not contribute to the plot but establishes the theme of unintended consequences for Inez. Nelson notes that Didion often begins her essays with weather patterns, setting an “ominous emotional tone” (Nelson 2017, p.149). This ominous tone captures the combination of atomic bombs in paradise, as well as Inez’s affair with an older man who is a CIA agent. Instead of images of a Hawaiian sky, the narrator of The Last Thing He Wanted opens by establishing the political atmosphere of the decade: “Somewhere in the nod, we were dropping cargo. Somewhere in the nod we were losing infrastructure, losing redundant systems, losing specific gravity. Weightlessness seemed at the time the safer mode” (p. 3). This novel opens in the shimmer of unidentified “cargo,” before it moves to specific events of 1984, but this shimmer is where the male characters operate.

After establishing the atmosphere, the narrators report the genealogy of the crisis and the men involved. In Democracy, “Didion” goes behind the immediate crisis of the shootings, exploring the history of the Christian family’s interests in Hawaii that intersected with U.S. military actions throughout the 20th century. The narrator “Didion” explains, “I saw [the Christians] as a family in which the colonial impulse had marked every member” (Didion 1984, p. 26). Inez’s marriage to Harry Victor adds the New York-Washington, D.C. political axis, represented by Harry and his campaign manager Barry Dillon. Inez represents less an attack on these comforting narratives but a clarity to recognize her genealogy and extricate herself from the undertow.

Of course, Paul Christian’s shooting of his daughter Janet Ziegler and her “friend” Congressman Wendell Omura attracts national attention. This public crisis coincides with a pending negotiation between Janet’s husband and the Omura family, as well as the aftermath of Harry Victor’s presidential bid—putting these private conspiracies at risk of public scrutiny. To serve their own capitalistic and political interests, none of the surviving players can afford outrage over the possible adultery or over Paul Christian’s sudden violence. Their public statements reveal that these patriarchal men have little interest in protecting their wives or daughters. Inez’s exile and her sister’s death were ordained by the Christian dynasty and American democracy, as practiced by men like Harry Victor.

While Inez survives her family and their maneuvers, Elena is unable to pull herself free of the sins of her father. For a while, she kept herself above his world, first with her marriage, then as a journalist. However, in trying to comfort her dying father, Elena becomes trapped in the consequences of his long career. It may seem ironic that Inez and Elena each leave their marriage to a respectable powerbroker –only to fall into the arms of a man known for “fixing.” They choose the shadows over the social pages: respectively CIA agent Jack Lovett and Department of State “ambassador at large” Treat Morrison. Their love triangles map “onto the divide between a naïve version of mainstream politics and the pragmatic mandate of national security that perceives violence to be a necessary evil” (Loughran 2013, p. 428). Strangely, these men offer these awakened protagonists more honesty, both in discussing the protagonists’ fraught circumstances and in their love.

Though Elena paid the ultimate cost, Elena’s father and her lover Treat both failed to get the thing they actually wanted: a big score or Elena. Neither of them are able to control the dominoes that were set in motion. As the narrator observes, “Every moment could be seen to connect to every other moment, every act to have logical if obscure consequences, an unbroken narrative of vivid complexity” (Didion 1996, p. 56). In the military industrial complex, there is no such thing as actions that are clean and distinct.

In these novels, personal and political honesty receive equal value. While Inez is unable to count on her father, husband, or brother in-law, ironically Jack Lovett is the one person in her life with integrity—who cares not only for her, but by extension for her sister and daughter. He has always been direct with her about his work; in her 20s, she offhandedly introduces “Didion” to Jack: “he’s running a little coup somewhere” (Didion 1984, p. 34). The Ziegler-Christians, Omuras and Victors would never admit to running a coup—keeping themselves enough steps removed to deny culpability. While Jack and Treat may be more directly tied to offshore violence, they are not driven by personal profit or power. But this does not make them heroic.

As a fixer, Treat Morrison seeks Elena out after he is alerted to her suspicious presence on the island. But instead of evading him, Elena quickly confides in him, welcoming the chance for an honorable end, by standing her ground. As Eder (1996) describes him, “Treat walks honorably and trails slime; the hapless Elena is lured by the honor and destroyed by the slime.” Their affair is poignant and healing like Jack’s and Inez’s, though even briefer. When Elena is set up and killed (ironically as the reported assassin of Treat), she dies “mixed up” with the media’s idea of who she should be.

However, before she dies, she knows that Treat sees her for who she is, not who she should be. As Loughran (2013) observes, “Lovett and Morrison are represented as chivalric defenders of the female right to reticence, securing feminine self-determination only through the imposition of hegemonic masculine norms” (p. 432). As for Inez, Elena’s brief experience of being seen is worth the cost—even though the official reports name her as Treat’s assassin. He survives, but she is killed “by the slime.” Elena’s death may have been the last thing that her father Dick McMahon or Treat Morrison wanted, but they were incapable of taking any action to prevent it.

Cohen (2009) places Didion among late 20th century novelists that use fictional narratives to place national narratives under scrutiny, with Didion particularly “explicit in its focus on the connections between narrative form and the structures of national histories” (p. 138). The cool voices of Didion’s narrators guide readers through this scrutiny over the unintended consequences of these men’s actions and inactions—and by extension, scrutinizing the government interests’ they serve.

5. But Not My Daughter

While the Didion Woman may be an ambivalent wife or daughter, she generally remains committed to her role as a mother. In an interview, Joan Didion noted that A Book of Common Prayer is about the relationship between mothers and daughters (Dunne 2017). This may not be obvious—Charlotte’s daughter Marin disappears before the beginning of the novel; her second daughter is born severely disabled, dying after a few months. However, Charlotte’s inability to save her daughters is key to her wandering. Similarly, Maria in Play It as It Lays (Didion 1970) spends so much time on the freeway because her daughter lives in an institution, not at home, leaving her similarly detached and compelled to move. Since the protagonists of Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, for better or worse, recognize their place in history, they strive to free their daughters from this legacy, giving purpose to their movements.

Inez’s mother Carol may have become aware of her place in history, but her escape did not include her daughters. Carol gave up her position as a Hawaiian socialite to work in public relations on the mainland. As Carol drunkenly justifies leaving them behind at her daughter Janet’s wedding: “I got my marvelous, interesting career, which I never would have had, and you got—…You got horses. Convertibles when the time came. Tennis lessons. I couldn’t have paid for stringing your racket if I’d taken you with me” (Didion 1984, p. 154). While Carol chose purpose and independence for herself, she convinced herself that her daughters only needed material comforts.

But Carol did not escape the Christian family scot-free: shortly after her return for Janet’s wedding, her single-engine plane crashes on a business trip. Irom (2012) notes how Carol’s story functions as an imperialist critique, dramatizing the “tacit links between ‘domesticity,’ ‘home’ and imperial adventures abroad” (p. 70). Janet and Inez were left behind to assume their roles as “imperialist” hostesses, the role that their mother fled. Janet married into another Hawaiian dynastic family, a stale marriage that led to her affair with Omura. Inez merely exchanged her tropical island life to a powerbase on the island of Manhattan, raising a son and a daughter while supporting her husband’s ambitions as his hostess and accessory. Inez “had spent her childhood immersed in the local conviction that the comfortable entrepreneurial life of an American colony in a tropic without rot represented a record of individual triumphs over a hostile environment” (Didion 1984, p. 211). Since this hostile environment claimed Janet, Carol’s exit did not save anyone.

However, unlike her mother, Inez became conscious that her compromises have affected her children as much as herself. While her daughter makes the self-abusing “consumer” choice of heroin, her son becomes dangerously careless:

That was the summer after Adlai had the accident (the second accident, the bad one, the accident in which the fifteen-year-old from Denver lost her left leg and the function of one kidney), and it was also the June 1973, during which Inez found Jessie on the floor of her bedroom with the disposable needle and the glassine envelope in her Snoopy wastebasket.

(Didion 1984, p. 60)

Perhaps Inez is less concerned about Adlai, since his “accidents” prove that he is already a Christian-Victor man. However, when her daughter runs away from rehab in Seattle to Saigon, she breaks away from her sister’s deathbed, asking Jack to find her, which he does. Avoiding sentimentality, there is no magical reunion between mother and daughter—but Inez extricates Jessie from U.S. politics and imperialism.

Individually, Inez and Jessie permanently remove themselves from their family control, beyond U.S. borders—while the power plays of father and son continue. Inez chooses to work with refugees, teaching American literature in Kuala Lumpur, ignoring the postcards of her husband’s manager Barry Dillon. Jesse follows a journalist boyfriend to Mexico, where she writes a romance novel. In answer to Dillon’s demand for explanation for not returning to Harry, Inez answers with Images: “Colors, moisture, heat, enough blue in the air. Four fucking reasons” (Didion 1984, p. 232, italics original). As “Joan Didion” declines to find a coherent narrative in the life of Inez Victor, the master narratives of mid-century United States—in particular, the narrative of democracy—are likewise found inadequate. While Inez and Jessie’s expat lives still draw on their privilege, enacting a different kind of cultural imperialism, they avoid serving as accomplices or even cover.

In The Last Thing He Wanted, Elena departs not in reaction to a specific crisis, but from her recognition of the superficial. After surviving breast cancer, Elena McMahon looks up from her plate at an Academy Award gala: “I can’t fake this anymore” (Didion 1996, p. 95), leaving her lush California life to move East with her daughter Catherine. She believes there is still a chance for her and Catherine to have an authentic life: “she had walked away from the house on the Pacific Coast Highway. She did not think Wynn, she thought the house on Pacific Coast Highway” (p. 41). Her equation of her marriage to a house, not the man, demonstrates the superficiality of her day-to-day existence. Carol Christian’s motives for leaving her life may resemble Elena—however, Elena recognizes the danger to her daughter of casual luxury.

Elena’s failed attempt to lose herself in marriage parallels Inez’s marriage to Harry Victor. After years of “faking it,” Elena is directly confronting the secrets of her upbringing: “It had cost something to grow up watching her father come and go and do his deals without ever noticing what it was he dealt” (Didion 1996, p. 154). The only other time in her life she admitted to herself what her father did for a living was when she dropped out of college rather than fill out her scholarship’s financial disclosure requirements. While Wynn’s wealth is less obviously tainted, Elena understands that not knowing is not good enough. Having ignored the mark against her own life, Elena worries about Catherine, as Inez focuses on saving Jessie after failing her sister Janet.

In choosing the real, Elena moves with her daughter to D.C., covering a presidential campaign as a Washington Post reporter. Stout (1998) describes Inez’s trajectory in Democracy, “whose departure from the house of domesticity has taken her further into the realm of the political” (p. 189): this applies even more to Elena’s path. To atone for her father’s and her husband’s maneuvers, she joins the legitimate political process. Yet instead of straight lines, she begins to experience “a fatigue near vertigo” (Didion 1996, p. 27) from her daily spins. When this moment coincides with her father’s deathbed wish, she walks away from the campaign: “After her husband’s odorless and abstract $100-million deals, Elena finds her father’s smaller larcenies have the stink of humanity. For the first time in a life of evasion, she makes a commitment—disastrous, of course” (Eder 1996). Yet, once she realizes that she is ensnared by this simple favor, she puts her daughter’s life above her own. Though Wynn’s money might have extricated Elena, she needed Wynn uninvolved to keep Catherine safe.

Not only does Elena remain trapped on the island for her daughter, but she likewise felt an ethical need to face the consequences. This is a major deviation from how Elena had dealt previously with uncomfortable truths: “She knew how to cut and run. She had done is often enough” (Didion 1996, p. 39). Instead Elena strives to be fully aware, rather than being an unknowing dupe or endangering her daughter. After being shielded from reality and its consequences by her father and then her husband, she is a now conscious player rather than adjacent to the actions of men.

Elena hopes to pass the lessons that she has paid the ultimate price for her to her daughter. As she writes to Catherine:

Sometimes we argue about things, but I think we both know I only argue because I want your life to be happy and good. Want you to not waste your time. Not to waste your talents. Not to let who you are get mixed up with anybody’s idea of who you should be.

(Didion 1996, p. 115, italics original)

When Elena walks into the trap, she dies “mixed up” with the media’s idea of “who she should be.” She also fails to “save” her daughter; when the narrator visits Wynn years later, he points proudly to Catherine’s wedding photo, showing that Catherine chose the life of unquestioned privilege. When Elena took Catherine away, Catherine lamented the loss of tennis courts, three cars and a pool. Elena challenged her: “Is that your idea of a real life?” (Didion 1996, p. 42). Ultimately, Catherine’s choice was to surrender her idea of who she was for comfort and security. While Inez manages to disentangle herself and her daughter, Elena demonstrates how strong the undertow of consequences and privilege can be.

The Didion Women, despite the stuff thrown at them, are first and foremost mothers. Though they cannot choose for their daughters, to force awareness on them, they at least deliberately make sacrifices in their attempts to free them from history.

6. Conclusions

Throughout her writing, Didion balances her critique of American culture, with her belief that real change is beyond challenging. As she writes in The White Album,

If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect a man’s fate in the slightest, I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.

(Didion 1979, p. 206, italics mine)

Though Didion declined to join any barricade—anti-war, civil rights or feminism—she remained committed “to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities” (Didion 1972, p. 2) in her essays and her novels, and to looking at situations with honesty. In connecting Didion’s novels to second-wave feminism, Als (2019) reflects, “in Didion’s fiction, the standard narratives of women’s lives are mangled, altered, and rewritten all the time,” believing her earlier novels succeeded in “representing what repression does to the soul.”

However, in her last novels, her protagonists and their narrators resist being mangled and rewritten—instead acting to save their souls and the souls of their daughters. As Nadel (1995) summarizes, Didion’s last novels evoke the “personal and national cost of propagating America’s colonialist narrative” as well as “the author’s and reader’s complicity in the narrative” (p. 278). However, her focus in these works is decidedly the personal, privileging the heartache of her protagonists as daughters, lovers, and mothers over any political fallout.

Throughout her writing, Didion has lain low, observing American culture, whether her subject be fashion, popular culture, media, geography, literature, motherhood, grief, or global politics. Through her society matron protagonists, Didion highlights how difficult it is to contain out-sourced amorality and violence, “the dissemination rather than the centralization of authority” (Levesque 1998, p. 85). By “failing” to narrate the conspiracies at the heart of her novels, that claim the lives of female bystanders, Didion keeps the tangled history of these opportunists reverberating, beyond the attempts of fixers to contain it. She insists on making the lives and sufferings of women like her protagonists visible.

While Didion may decline to go to the barricade to overthrow the patriarchy, her final novels consistently question the narratives of their justifications—these men in control offer neither democracy nor victory. Inez and Elena may not achieve empowerment or self-fulfillment, but they escape the literal boundaries of the United States and external definitions. The final Didion Women of Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted complete the woman-centered project of Joan Didion’s fiction—coupling personal yearning with political responsibility.