"The Refrigerator Monologues" by Catherynne M. Valente (2017)

**In which a generation of female comic book characters killed off as part of a male character's backstory finally get to tell their side**

Ok, to start with, let's talk about the "Women in Refrigerators" trope.  If you already know what that is, I'll wave down below and you can skip there

In short, [edit: I wrote "in short" but then the explanation turned out not to be very short, including multiple tangents and a full indented quote, oops sorry] the term "Women in refrigerators" was first coined in 1999 by Gail Simone.  At the time, Simone was just a comic book fan, but amazingly she's since become one of the more well-known writers for the "Big 2" American comics companies (DC and Marvel).  Incidentally, she's kind of a badass, and there are multiple examples of her on twitter weighing in on a discussion only to have some asshole guy see a woman's name and avatar and say, "uhh what do you know???"  At which point she usually says something like, "well, I wrote it, so . . ."

Simone came up with the term "Women in Refrigerators" directly referencing a specific story in which one character gets his superpowers, but he's not sure whether to become a superhero or not or whatever.  But then the bad guy kills his girlfriend, Alexandra DeWitt, and stuffs her into a fridge, and this becomes the thing that motivates him to avenge her, beat the bad guy, become a hero and etc. etc.  It's his origin story

And Simone was the one who pointed out, ". . . haven't we done this story a million times already?"  She published a whole massive list of all the time comic book authors kill off / cripple / etc. a female character.  As she went about collecting this list, she observed that so often these deaths aren't even about the character herself, but rather simply meant to be a single beat in the story of a male character.  And that's coupled with the fact that that it's hard to think of a single female comic book character who *hasn't* had something terrible happen to her

Like so many micro-aggressions, each single instance of this trope can be excused or explained.  The author of that particular story even replied to Simone directly, and she published his reply on her website:

I created [Alexandra DeWitt] with the intention of having her be murdered at the hands of [the bad guy]. I took a lot of care in building her as a character, because I wanted her to be liked and her death to mean something to the readers. I wanted readers to be horrified at the crime, and to empathize with [the hero's] loss. Her death was meant to bring brutal realization to [him] that being [a hero] wasn't fun and games. It was also meant to sever his links with his old life, paving the way for his move to New York. And ultimately I wanted her death to be memorable and illustrate just how truly heinous [the villain] was. Thus the fridge.

It makes sense in context, sure.  But the problem is that it happens so often.  In the end, it's basically just lazy writing--the easiest way to drum up some pathos and motivation for a male main character is to have something terrible happen to a woman he cares about.  Often times, be it Highlander or Taken or John Wick, it doesn't even happen on-screen.  And while sometimes this tragedy does end up proving important in the long term--Batman remains motivated by the death of his parents for the entirety of his canon--oftentimes it's rarely even mentioned again.  Comics about Alexandra DeWitt's hero boyfriend never even seem to recall her, she was basically forgotten twenty issues later.  This is largely because, as the author himself admitted, she was never intended, from the very beginning, to be anything more than disposable.  Her only reason for existing was to be killed off.  And as Simone points out, this is a very common fate for female characters in comics, or in media in general

And with that backstory, that's where Catherynne Valente starts

::waves:: hi everyone!  Ok, on to the review

Let me first say that Valente is one of my absolute favorite authors.  I've wanted to write about her for this blog for a while, and wasn't sure which book.  Maybe "Deathless" for its incomparable poetry, maybe "Space Opera" for its sheer irreverence.  It's worth noting that her range is absolutely incredible, every single book I've read of hers I've said, "wow, this is nothing like her other novels".  In the end though, it's Women's History Month, and I really, really, really want to talk about "The Refrigerator Monologues", because wow what a book

Valente was inspired to write this book after watching "The Amazing Spider-Man 2".  Well, maybe "inspired" is the wrong word.  "Enraged" might be better.  Because as she watched Gwen Stacy die, well . . . I should just let her tell it.  Here's an interview she gave about the book:

I burst into tears and said, “I have to write something to fix this.”

My partner answered, “Sweetheart, you know you can’t fix Gwen Stacy dying. She was always going to die. She always dies. It’s kind of a thing.”

And I said, “YES I CAN. I’m going to write something and it’s going to be called The Refrigerator Monologues and it’s going to be The Vagina Monologues for superheroes’ girlfriends. I’m going to fix it. Hold my drink. Don’t believe me? Just watch!”

It’s not like I didn’t know Gwen Stacy was going to die. As has been noted, she always dies. But the way the movie was paced, I kind of thought they’d keep that for the third movie, because the Emma Stone/Andrew Garfield chemistry was kind of all that iteration had going for it. So, it blindsided me in a way that Gwen Stacy taking her dive should never blindside anyone born after 1970, and it was a sucker punch, because more or less the last thing Emma Stone does before she quite literally flounces off to meet her doom is snit, “Nobody makes my decisions for me, nobody! This is my choice. Mine.”

I can make my own decisions! Boom. Splat. Death. Girl down.

It felt like such a harsh slap in the face. People so often think of iconic characters as organic things that proceed semi-autonomously while the writer just records their actions, but someone chose to give her those words. They made it through many rounds of editing and screen-testing. Someone chose to have her say that right before it all goes to hell. To make those powerful words the punchline to a sad joke about female agency by punishing her for them, by making sure that no matter how modern and independent the new Gwen might seem, everything is just as it has always been. That old, familiar message slides into our brains with the warm familiarity of a father’s hug: when women make their own choices, disaster results.

I cried because I was furious that I’d been fooled. Fooled into thinking anything had changed. Fooled into thinking that the punchline could ever be anything different. I cried because they baited me with Gwen’s job and her lines and her lab coat and with the date on the movie reel into believing, just once, that the person I’m meant to identify with in superhero stories could be more than a sassy prop.

So I planned out The Refrigerator Monologues.

And that's what this book is about.  It's about giving a voice to all of those characters that got stuffed into fridges in order to motivate a hero.  Oh and this book is angry, and I fucking love it

Obviously, Valente didn't want to pay the licensing rights for all this intellectual property, so she wrote homages.  Pastiches.  References, certainly.  Even people with a passing knowledge of pop culture should be able to spot a few of them, like the woman who falls in love with an abusive psychopath within an insane asylum.  Certainly, any moderate comic book fan should be able to spot most of the characters, such as the one whose neck is snapped after she's thrown off a bridge during the hero's first fight with his arch-nemesis, or the one who leaves her hero boyfriend and ends up descending into a life of pornography and drugs

All she's trying to do is give these characters a voice.  From same interview as the quote above:

Of course, my guy was right—you can’t fix Gwen Stacy dying. She was always going to die. She always dies. It’s kind of a thing. And I’ll tell you right now, I didn’t save her. The book takes place in hell. I’m not that kind of hero. I can’t swoop in and save the damsel. What I can do is turn on a mic and let the damsel scream.

These women call themselves "The Hell Hath Club", and the book is simply a series of monologues as each of them tell their stories.  Valente gives voice to all of the woman who have been hurt or traumatized not as part of some grand world-saving gesture (discussions of the "Women in Refrigerators" trope note that while male characters do die in comics, usually it's some grand sacrifice to save the day.  Whereas women die in the first or second Act out of five), but simply as a minor part of a larger plot:

Trouble is, my story is his story. The story of Kid Mercury crowds out everything else, like Christmas landing on the shops in August while Halloween tries to get a bat in edgewise. It’s not his fault. I’m not even mad. Who wants to hear about an intern eking out a 2.21% improvement in the structural cohesion and tensile strength of an experimental alloy when they could look out the window of her very productive lab and see a guy in a slick silver suit swinging a haymaker at the metallic jaw of a former professor of music theory? BAM. POW. No contest. I have to try to squeeze in around the edges of him, to cram my little witch’s hat on the department store shelf next to his great fat silver star.

She focuses not only on women who get killed so that the hero can be sad about it, but also ones like the abovementioned psychopath's girlfriend, who basically exists just to show that wow, this bad guy is like, really bad, am I right?  She even has a whole story based on the sole female hero on a team of super-powered mutants whose powers keep growing and growing until [spoiler, but again, it's the premise of the whole book.  Of course Jean Grey dies, she always dies] the team has to put her down:

We grew strong. I grew strong. It made everyone nervous, but I couldn’t see why. Isn’t stronger better? Would they all have whispered like that if Bruce suddenly sprouted new powers? I doubted it. The world likes a big man punching things to get bigger and punch harder.

And while she can't save these women, she can at least let them, in her versions of this universe, speak their minds:

“She can’t control it,” Paravox whispered to the Professor. 

“No one could,” Bruce hurried to say, so I wouldn’t take it personally. 

“The more she uses her powers, the less human she gets,” Hal Cyon sighed, looking so fucking earnest while he called me less than human. So fucking sincere. 

“What the fuck, Hal,” I snapped. “You can turn into a time-traveling dragon. How human are you?”

I loved this book because of how unashamed it is of its anger.  The characters in this book are angry, the author is angry, and they have a right to this anger.  Because god knows this trope isn't just comics, and it isn't new (the narrator casually mentions, "Helen and Medea and Iphigenia and Clytemnestra—the original Hell Hath Club").  It's about time these women got to tell their sides of the story.  They've been silenced so long, because a lot of society really doesn't like facing the anger of women.  Doesn't like even admitting that it exists

It has gotten better.  Gail Simone launched her website in 1999, and since then there has been more awareness of this trope and conscious attempts not to fall into its trap.  Harley Quinn has been allowed to grow far beyond simply a psychopath's girlfriend, Mera has gotten stories as a queen and a hero in her own right, Karen Page got a much more nuanced portrayal in the Netflix show.  Other characters, ones not referenced in "The Refrigerator Monologues" have gotten slightly better fates since 1999.  Steph Brown and Barbara Gordon have been defrosted out of their fridges.  Carol Danvers, if you don't know what I'm talking about there's no need to look it up, let's just say I'm glad they have done what they did with the character for the MCU

But we still have a long, long ways to go.  And poor Alex is still in that fridge, largely forgotten unless there's another big event where the writers want to traumatize her boyfriend again for a few splash pages.  So if comic book authors aren't going to tell her story, I'm glad that Valente did

I loved this book

The Hell Hath Club walks its newest member out into the Lethe Café, into music and moonlight and steaming cups of nothing that taste like remembering. Her frozen blue skin gleams like the bottles behind the bar. We help her into the booth, hold her hand, slip her a joke or two to make her smile. 

What’s the difference between being dead and having a boyfriend? 

Death sticks around.