Diary: Laura Kolb, From the Literary Annals of Women’s Deceit

In literature and life, women lie

Becky Sharp (1965), Norman Rockwell

In 1615, a now-forgotten pamphleteer named Joseph Swetnam published a treatise titled The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women. In many ways an unremarkable entry into the long-running querelle des femmes, or debate about women, The Arraignment stands out for the sheer boisterous virulence of its first few chapters (which evince a misogyny so acute at least one woman wrote and published a refutation, an unusual move in early seventeenth-century England). Among Swetnam’s many accusations against the daughters of Eve is the repeated assertion that women lie. Women dissemble, flatter, entice, and deceive; they “worke their craft” with words, looks, gestures, and falsifying cosmetics. So abundant and various are the “crafty deceits of women” that, Swetnam asserts, they could never be recorded, even “if all the world were paper, and all the sea inke, and all the trees and plants were pens, and every man in the world were a writer.”

Plenty have done their best. The feminine capacity for deceit is a perennial literary subject, from Clytemnestra’s or Medea’s secret scheming to the machinations of characters like Amy Dunne in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012) and Alex in Emma Cline’s The Guest (2023), both of whom are experts in (as Amy puts it) “pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.” In the Middle Ages, women’s deceptions appear in courtly lais and bawdy fabliaux. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath tricks her abusive husband into thinking he has killed her; as it happens, they’ve been fighting over his love of a “book of wicked wives,” a volume filled with tales of lecherous, treacherous women. When they’re not wearing actual disguises, Shakespeare’s heroines are crack hands at improvisational dissembling, while his villainesses offer lessons in machiavellianism: “Look like th’ innocent flower, / But be the serpent under ’t,” counsels Lady Macbeth. The early novel is filled with lying women, from the shape-shifting heroines of Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina or Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders to, later on, Thackeray’s conniving Becky Sharp. Liars hover at the edges of Austen’s marriage plots, threatening to snatch love and money from patient, well-mannered heroines (whose virtues, Austen takes pains to show us, also involve crafted, if not crafty, performance). From Lorelei Lee to Clare Kendry, women con their way through twentieth-century fiction, trading artifice for money, marriage, security, a place in the world. Looked at from one angle, Western literary history itself starts to resemble a gargantuan “book of wicked wives.”

But are all women’s lies actually that: wicked? The ancient Greeks distinguished between the wily cunning of a heroic figure like Odysseus and Clytemnestra’s low scheming, but they also admired Penelope for her guile. Even the most staunchly antifeminist entries in the querelle tradition tend to include examples of good women’s trickery. St. Jerome’s Against Jovinian, an important source for later writers including Chaucer and Swetnam, condemns women as dissemblers but praises virgin martyrs who cleverly deceive their rapacious captors. Even Swetnam’s Arraignment contains examples of “pearls” among the “dust” of womankind, including the tale of a lady who frees her husband from prison by swapping garments with him. Maybe the worth of a woman’s lie can be found in the uses to which it is put: wicked lies threaten patriarchal hierarchies; good ones uphold them. But at least by Swetnam’s day—and I’d argue as early as the Odyssey—the boundary between good and bad lies was hard to keep stable. After all, cunning itself operates as a kind of irresistible lure for listeners and readers: we like to see a trick well executed, whatever its ends. Not long after Swetnam’s pamphlet reignited the ancient debate about women, Richard Brathwaite published Ar’t Asleepe Husband?, a collection of “witty jests” and “merry tales” that happily jumbles anecdotes about enticing coquettes, cheating wives, “dissembling crones,” and one clever lady who tricks her husband into taking her to the theater—all presented more or less without judgment. Women lie: that’s entertainment! (It still is; see Big Little Lies and Pretty Little Liars.)

And yet the record of feminine deceit shows some plasticity. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes with characteristic deadpan flair that “woman plays the part of those secret agents who are left to the firing squad if they get caught, and are loaded with rewards if they succeed.” Adrienne Rich, in her essay, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” echoes de Beauvoir in locating feminine deception in the prevailing conditions of risk and reward, writing that “women have been forced to lie, for survival, to men.” Feminist thinkers and gender theorists may have amply developed the idea that being (or becoming) a woman involves (at times unwitting, at times strategic) artifice, but few have taken up deception as a topic of inquiry—understandably, since “women lie” has always been the central claim of the antifeminist tradition. It is mostly in narrative fiction that women’s skilled, strategic, deceptive lies take center stage, and narrative fiction links women’s lies to women’s particular social coordinates. Attending to these lies—and inferring the calculus of risk and reward that lies behind them—throws the contours of the social systems, hierarchies, codes, and rules that shape specific interpersonal situations into sharp relief.

Of course, Clytemnestra is up against a different set of limitations than Becky Sharp. But across all these stories, women’s lies index their disenfranchisement. Guile gets you what the world is designed to prevent you from getting. “It is a manoeuvring business,” declares Austen’s Mary Crawford. She’s talking about the marriage market, but she could be captioning any number of feminine dissembler plots—or summing up the business of being a woman in the world, period. As Rich puts it, with aphoristic understatement, “We have been required to tell different lies at different times, depending on what the men of the time needed to hear.” The circuit implied here—between powerlessness and dissimulation, disenfranchisement and deception—is the circuit that Euripides and Haywood and Cline and countless others have spun into narrative. That same circuit is central to theories of power from Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment to Saidiya Hartman’s excavation of slavery’s spectacles. What Hartman terms “the simulation of compliance for covert aims” can replace sincere displays of deference, gratitude, obedience, fear, or love. What narratives of deceitful women show us so forcefully is, I think, that there is a clear trajectory from required performances to self-serving or subversive ones: a causal connection between the displays women produce to suck up to power, and the lies they spin to seize or subvert it. This is why these narratives often invite competing, even conflicting, interpretations, simultaneously recruiting both Swetnam-style condemnation of lying women and feminist (or proto-feminist) consciousness of the unfair, even unbearable, conditions that require women to learn to lie.

Medea tricks her husband into murdering his new wife before sneaking off to kill their children. Euripides locates her deceptions in a mundane world where women must adopt “new rules and different customs” when they become wives and need “a prophet’s skill” to divine their husband’s desires. Twenty-five hundred later, Amy Dunne fakes her own death and frames her husband. Like Medea, Gone Girl strongly suggests that Amy’s villainous scheming depends on skills developed in service of everyday, required acts. “Men actually think this girl exists,” she marvels, describing the sexually available, undemanding “cool girl” she once embodied. “Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.”

Both Medea and Amy are monstrous women, confirming ancient misogynist stereotypes; both develop performance skills in the ordinary course of things. Eventually, those skills come unhooked from the daily routines of dominance and subordination in which they originally emerged. These figures are terrifying but they are also, at least to some degree, perfectly ordinary. They are both instances of a story that seems weirdly immune to historical change: the narrative of a woman who realizes she can lie for herself, and in so doing threatens the order of things. The order of things, after all, relies on her lying for others. It’s a story that we are going to keep telling, I think, as long as it has something to tell us.

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Laura Kolb is the author of Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare. She is an Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York.

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