Rachel Cusk’s ‘Second Place’ Names Freedom as Gendered Violence
Rachel Cusk returns with Second Place (2021), a strong departure in narrative from her highly successful Outline trilogy. Unlike Outline, which interrogates a large variety of interactions and relationships at varying points of the narrator’s life, Second Place largely hones in on a single, obsessive relationship between narrator “M” and an artist “L.” M and L are consistent foils throughout the novel, reacting and interacting in ways that both confound and provide representative juxtaposition of female and male experientialism.
M is a mother and writer. She lives her life in solitude, living in a marshland with her husband, Tony, while the occasional artistic-type stays in their guesthouse as a place of respite. As is perhaps common in middle life, M is engaging in existential exploration, tracing backwards in time the moments that led her to the quiet, fulfilling, but hardly exotic life she now leads. In contrast, L has engaged in a life of full freedom, untying himself from traditional obligations – no children, little family to speak of, capricious friendships, youthful romances – and instead travels the world, making paintings that evoke masculinity and freedom. M invites L to stay at the guesthouse, her “second place,” in an effort to better understand herself, hoping that his presence clarifies her own desires and contentments.
Cusk makes apparent that the difference in life experiences between M and L are entirely gendered. M speaks of L’s art as a gateway into manhood and the freedom that comes with it: “There is no particular reasons, on the surface, why L’s work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman – but least of all, surely, a young mother on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallised in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke.” M senses that there are parts of her – parts realized before motherhood – that yearn for a renunciation of the trappings of femininity, including domesticity and subordination of one’s will to that of their offspring. But to act on these parts of herself is impossible; her daughter, Justine, has ostensibly shut and locked the door on purely selfish, uninhibited freedom that is the sentiment in L’s artwork (and his identity, generally).
M also notices that she and L feel the passing of time differently because of their disparate lives. M’s choices – those that would be considered by most as “settling down” – make meaning in her life. Read: lasting relationships equate to fulfillment. However, this means that time, in her conception, is a gradual progression that retracts from full presence: “There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.” M has hit the brake – she is no longer interested in the autopilot “forward” movement she associates with living – instead finding fascinating the lack of directionality in L’s life. He has to be nowhere, so goes everywhere, following sensory inclinations (lust, fear, gluttony). M takes this sensibility as proof that L “lives in the moment,” free of planning and prospecting.
M and L live uncomfortably in each other’s presence. Their fundamental different-ness leads to both a trepidation and a straddle-stance between hate and admiration, but never apathy: the definitive balancing-act of obsession. The climax of the novel reads as M’s cliffhanger – she is on the brink of personal disaster. Believing that she needs to taste L’s freedom, she begs him to paint her, to which he reluctantly agrees. She puts on her wedding dress – the one garment she claims is “fitted,” sexual, beautiful, feminine enough in her wardrobe – yet upon further notice, the choice of attire seems to ridicule the life she leads. She puts it on haphazardly, as if the vows she made and the symbolism woven within the fabric are casual choices made, able to be made light of by a re-wear for seemingly insignificant circumstances. Oh, this old thing? I just threw it on. It is renunciation of the life she has built with Tony, who reads it as such, leaving in a fury unbeknownst prior.
M herself suggests that she purposefully makes minor of her marriage as an exercise in self-destruction, a tease. “Does catastrophe have the power to free us?” She asks, “Can the intransigence of what we are be broken down by an attack violent enough to ensure we are only barely able to survive it?” She contemplates this relationship between violence and freedom, wondering if the former is needed to achieve the latter.
It isn’t until this violence becomes reality that she fully understands the great boon her identity as deeply feminine and maternal has provided, and how deeply entrenched gendered violence was in her own psyche. She has overvalued freedom as fulfillment, when, instead, it often offers little more than emptiness to its pursuant. She realizes that her idolatry of freedom is a desire to possess a distinctly male kind of empowerment; the need stems from her awareness that the endeavor of freedom that L embraces is intrinsically associated with a reproductive disunion between sexuality and love unavailable to women as child bearers. This empowerment is a choice available to males, but not always embraced - after all, M sees a different version of manhood in her husband, Tony, who values commitment, stillness. It is ultimately that the option to lead a selfish, sensory life isn’t available to M that almost destroys her.
M’s relationship to Justine ultimately saves her. It takes a simple exchange of laughter and comment from Justine – “Thank God you’re my mother” – that releases M from her previous belief that freedom and commitment are contrarian. Perhaps there is a freedom in obligation, in building a life all your own, free from whimsy! She is reminded of the unique power of femininity and the blessings that commitment and non-freedom provide, and thus, is able to disassociate herself from her initial fetishization of the gendered experience.
I leave the reader to pick up Second Place and read what is a deeply introspective exploration of violence, gender, disassociation, freedom, and longing. In the tradition of Camus, the book will leave you with more questions than answers, in the very best way.
Second Place
by Rachel Cusk.
183 pages. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Buy on bookshop.
About the Author
Evie (Evangeline) Lopoo is a social science researcher, criminal justice advocate, and writer. She is a Project Manager for the Square One Project, housed at the Columbia University Justice Lab, in which capacity she works on international justice efforts and racial justice educational curricula. She is also working on a book manuscript about the history and current manifestations of probation and parole in the United States correctional system. You can find her policy publications at https://justicelab.columbia.edu/ and https://squareonejustice.org/ and her random thoughts at @EvieLopoo on Twitter. Evie is based in New York City.
