Garcia 1 “American fiction grew out of the attempt to chart the impacts which ensued, both upon Adam and upon the world he is thrust into. American fiction is the story begotten by the noble but illusory myth of the American as Adam .” —R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam Rachel Kushner’s 2018 novel, The Mars Room , debuted at #4 on the New York Times bestseller list, landed Time ’s “#1 Fiction Title of the Year,” and finalized for the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal. Reviewers applauded Kushner for creating “a blistering depiction of mass incarceration in the United States . . . [an] unflinching portrayal of what it means to be poor and female in America” (Allardice The Guardian ). The work succeeded as “a three-hundred-plus-page book about women whose freedom [had] been prematurely stolen from them” (Madeline Schwartz, The New York Review of Books ), and was compared to the hugely successful Netflix series, Orange Is the New Black , as a similarly humanizing, darkly comic glimpse into the world of women’s prison: “[H]ere too we are urged to see the inmates — with all their flaws and mistakes — as human, above all,” wrote Emily Rhodes of Financial Times Magazine. The novel’s political themes struck a nerve with the contemporary climate and generated an appreciation among readers for giving voice to an often-overlooked population. Christian Lorentzen in a review for Vulture wrote: “the politics of The Mars Room are pessimistic, and Kushner’s vision of the American carceral archipelago and the justice system in general is relentlessly and convincingly grim” ( Vulture ). Still, Garcia 2 Kushner’s work exceeds being a mere prison reform proposal or an overview of marginalized identities . Timeliness allows The Mars Room its most intricate form not as a call to social work, but as a contribution to writers utilizing the novel form and a shared, evolving literary history to parse the American identity. Kushner works through her investigation primarily through the lens of the American Adam, a literary trope based on the changing landscape of the 19th century and the idealization of a national figure in the United States. The trope’s explicit mention by the novel’s audience proxy, Ph.D. dropout and Thoreau aspirant, Gordon Hauser, supports this inquiry into American values. In this essay, I argue that Rachel Kushner explicitly invokes the American Adam in The Mars Room to demonstrate the trope’s incongruities through a contemporary, female, urban protagonist: a subject who experiences an inverted reality of this idealized figure. Largely, The Mars Room explores American approaches to agency, individualism, and the intertwined state of nature and technology to explicate the country’s foundations, which are themselves inspired by a maintained idealism . The novel charts the ways in 1 which this national idealism steers individual narratives and the process in which a disillusioned protagonist becomes forced to subscribe to this thinking (thus operating in a network of institutions influenced by the nationwide trope). By employing a character who avoids conventions and who is then forced to work within those previously rejected conventions, Kushner captures what nonfiction works cannot so easily demonstrate―the impossibility of an American Adam fantasy and, nonetheless, its influence on the 1 The idealism that aligns with aspirations inspired by the American Adam. Garcia 3 construction of society, which reaches across technology, institutions, nature, and gender and class expectations. In T he American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955), R.W.B. Lewis explains that 19 th century American narratives treated “a radically new personality . . . an individual emancipated from history . . . standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources” (5). In Lewis’ view, this “Adam” proposed a prelapsarian emblem of the new nation: a figure who scanned the natural world, its landscape devoid of monarchical landmarks as cultural guideposts like its English parent. This Adam had no past to burden him, only the present and future to make his own. Kushner’s Hauser looks to this image as a possible realization of American potential by Thoreauvian consciousness. For example, upon discovering the violent details of a character’s imprisonment, he feels conflicted rather than assured of her sentence, as if “he was trying to cross an eight-lane freeway on foot. He had his argument worked out, about why she was a victim” (263). Hauser embodies Lewis’ adoption of the Emersonian term, “the party of Hope,” those faithful to the American Adam vision (in contrast to “the party of Memory,” adherents to a Calvinist doctrine of inherent sinfulness) (Lewis 7). However, the “explosion” (Marx 203) of industrialism that rocked mid-19th-century America, the influence of British Romantic writers, and the cosmopolitan insistence of a collective crowded the Adamic hero and complicated its employment in literature not long after its emergence. Hauser’s disappointment is inevitable in our present America, but his adherence to the myth speaks to a Garcia 4 contemporary attachment to ideological legends and their influence on the nation’s constructed technological and institutional foundations. Amid authors who have dissected the American Adam trope like Lewis, David W. Noble, Leo Marx, and the more recent Viorica P â tea, María Eugenia Díaz, and Jonathan Mitchell, Kushner seems to pick up where they left off, firmly rooted in the 21st century with a cast of characters that falls outside the trope’s traditional scope. The American Adam, whose autonomous, dominating nature, is freed from any burdens of a past, is driven to succeed by his own hand. Conversely, as an individual who clings to history, Kushner’s protagonist, Romy Hall, stands in a sea of inmates with identical, state-issued blue uniforms and moves from the city—where she seemed to maintain some small form of agency—to a natural landscape that ensures her permanent imprisonment. Romy’s character supports a claim for the insufficiencies of the American Adam and emerges as evidence for the trope’s anachronistic nature by upending it at every turn. Kushner distributes the trope’s characteristics among several characters. Through Gordon Hauser, Kurt “Creep” Kennedy, Ted Kaczynski, and Henry David Thoreau, Kushner unpacks different interpretations of the American Adam’s components: individual agency, the absence of an inherited past, and the trope’s role as national mythology concerning nature and technology. Kushner’s male characters reflect these elements of the mythic Adam, while her female protagonist transforms these elements. In The New York Review of Books , Gary Wills argues that “One becomes American by going out . . . In his 1844 lecture on the Young American, Emerson said that Americans need the boundless West in order to become themselves” (Wills). The Garcia 5 principal aim, by Wills’ emphasis is to reach Americanness by achieving individual sovereignty, and thus, accessing one’s complex personhood through departures into nature. David W. Noble’s The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden (1968) claims that at the height of American Adam popularity, the “American Renaissance” upheld “the ability of the average citizen to rise above his personal weaknesses and the traditions and institutions of his European ancestors,” symbolized, Noble adds, in part by Andrew Jackson’s 1828 presidential election (5). During the popularization of the rising common man , Noble claims that American novelists of this period began writing with the following in mind: Is it possible that Americans are exempt from the human condition? Is it possible that men in the New World have escaped from the need to live within community, within a framework of institutions and traditions? . . . Can nature indeed redeem man, heal his spiritual divisions, and lift him above the constraints of social class? (Noble 5) In other words, did American authors discard the thematic thrusts of European literature as American politicians sought to do away with European political/cultural traditions? Kushner might answer, No . And, The Mars Room provides a resounding no in its leanings toward entrapment as a general fact of the human condition and its employed protagonist as one legally forced to live “within community, within a framework of institutions and traditions” (Noble 5). Under the American Adam, this inherent entrapment that builds the novel cannot exist. Like original sin, inevitable entrapment Garcia 6 precludes the individual from a pastless existence and a future set in motion only by his/her deliberate choices. AGENCY Romy Hall brushes up against the American Adam’s contemporary audience as she must consider herself attached to others for the remainder of her life sentence . In Kushner’s fiction, the agency associated with nature, naming, and creation erodes under the pressures of her society and its marginalized actors. In the realm of agency, the thinking that once led Americans to an infinite, natural vessel for creation at one’s discretion (even against societal conventions) finds its largest opposition. Kushner repeatedly emphasizes the lack of choice available to characters, especially in Romy and her recollection of life from childhood to her time at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. The Mars Room hosts a cast of those awarded little agency, often limited by gender and class expectations, but Romy’s position as a female sex worker and single mother who was herself raised in poverty in the Sunset District gives her biography an especially tenuous quality. Early in the novel, an absence of agency for women generates horrifying images of the San Francisco neighborhood and explains Romy’s rapid coming-of-age with bleak details. In recounting a childhood companion, Eva, Romy recalls a group of boys boasting a photograph they had taken of her friend: “Eva was passed-out drunk and stripped of her tough-kid uniform, with a baseball bat between her naked thighs . . . These boys with their photos, they knew what it meant to have done that to Eva and they Garcia 7 wanted me to see” (39). Pages earlier, Romy describes “an informal foster home for girls” run by a man who sexually assaulted tenants with knowledge of their limited options and a corrupted police brigade that would likely invade them in the same way (35-36). In this instance, and the image of Eva, the author conveys a patterned, deep-seated attack on women by those in power. These events supersede physical assault and aim to dismantle personhood, or a more abstract representation of their characters. Romy’s point that “they knew what it meant to have done that to Eva and they wanted me to see,” summarizes a nefarious manipulation of the power structures at play that corner women in communities like her own and construct an interminable maze of choices made by those in power (39). Eva’s relatedness to the American Adam in name alone (Eve) echoes her character’s presence as a foil of predeterminism to the agency-obsessed ideology that envelops her. Eva repeatedly appears in Romy’s memories for her limited agency and the narrator’s Edenic suggestion to invoke this binary of predetermined fate and an Adamic free will . 2 Against the novel’s examples of absent agency for women, Kushner then presents what she terms the “straight world”—those who are not incarcerated, poor, or sex workers, for example—as they address inmates for their series of choices that have landed them in prison. This dichotomy does more than prove the rigidity of some characters’ lives and their absence of choice. For those who have not experienced an unsheltered childhood like Romy’s, their responses to her imprisonment begin with 2 Note Romy’s recollection: “I looked at [Eva’s] face and her long black hair in profile and was convinced the devil was in charge of the future, mine and Eva’s, and that nothing could save us” (41). Beside the American Adam trope, Eva’s proximity to “Eve” indicates a connection to determined fates or endings that come by way of a “fall,” compounded by the Calvinist/Transcendentalist tensions that accompany Kushner’s religious connotations in word choice: “devil . . . nothing could save us.” Garcia 8 critiquing the choices she has made regardless of their context. In two instances, when Romy requests to see her son after his caretaker, Romy’s mother, has died, Stanville guards chide her for poor “decisions.” Romy recalls: ‘I used to feel sorry for you bitches,’ Jones said. ‘But if you want to be a parent, you don’t end up in prison. Plain and simple. Plain and simple.’ I tried to get up. . . . I tried to lift my head, bucked upward, thrashed my feet until they were pinned, until every part of me was pinned. (127) ‘Ms. Hall, I know it’s tough, but your situation is due one hundred percent to choices you made and actions you took. If you’d wanted to be a responsible parent, you would have made different choices.’ (157) In the former excerpt, Romy’s “pinned” position echoes the image of Eva and the reverberations of her physical assault. Romy has not made choices that exist in a vacuum. Kushner highlights the severed relationship between a privileged group’s perception and actions made for the sake of survival. For those in the “straight world,” these actions might seem to be isolated choices that soil opportunity or that limitless potential which one possesses under an American Adam idealism. However, Romy’s circumstances upend Adamic solitude wherein one is free to make choices as an individual divorced from collective restraints. This much is evinced in her name, which assumes profound significance for relating her lack of agency and a form of determinism antithetical to the American Adam thinking. Romy refers to various “rooms” throughout The Mars Room , although her character’s relation more closely mirrors her name’s suggestion. Romy Hall roams halls . Garcia 9 She moves through narrowed spaces that lead to determined ends outside of her control. Romy’s stunted agency and name parallel the prison’s own, “Stanville,” and the standstill at which the prisoners find themselves. In an overhead view of the novel, which on a different level suggests a kind of narrative surveillance, readers would see Romy navigating an endless maze erected by other characters with their own agency. This interminable entrapment suggests Romy’s prison number, 314159, or the endless form of pi (3). In both Romy’s name and her assigned prison number, Kushner hints at the uncontrollable trajectory for her protagonist. The significance of Romy’s name resonates most clearly in the novel’s closing pages, when an officer states, “Hall. You’re out of bounds, Hall . . . Hall, we have you surrounded” (335). Even Romy’s name works against the Adamic pride of free-range agency in nature. The officer’s notice of entrapment seems redundant beside “Hall.” The overt entrapment in this episode follows a series of pivotal rooms that build the novel entire. Throughout The Mars Room , Romy recounts the “miserable recovery room” where she delivered her son alone (83), “receiving,” a concrete room in prison where Button Sanchez delivers her daughter (82), the one-room cabin in the woods for Gordon Hauser (91), the visiting room at Stanville (119), Kennedy’s “apartment on Woodside [which] became a waiting room with no end to the waiting” (312), and the Mars Room itself. The Mars Room’s physical power as a space pulses as a microcosm of society like the more transparent microcosm of Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Agency and its absence bud in the Mars Room and bloom at Stanville, especially given Romy’s Garcia 10 clarity about the events leading up to Kurt “Creep” Kennedy’s harassment. Any assertions of choice for Romy remain private as part of a social contract within her patriarchal surroundings at the Mars Room. Kushner emphasizes this power structure and its hidden niches for female agency in the club. Specifically, Romy explains: “I did not have to . . . obey any rules, or think of most men as anything other than losers to be exploited but who believed they were exploiting us, and so it was naturally quite hostile as an environment, even as it was coated in pretend submission” (25). In Romy’s view, before a Mars Room regular (Kennedy) takes advantage of this feigned submission and stalks her, the club serves as a container for temporary performance. This notion of temporary performance depends on Romy’s illusion of her sovereignty against the outwardly patriarchal orientation of the club through the men’s purchasing power. She recalls, “The Mars Room was a place where you could do what you wanted; at least I had believed that” (25; emphasis mine). In hindsight, Romy realizes that Kennedy shattered this illusion of temporary performance by breaking an understanding among patrons and employees of the Mars Room for the sake of his own agenda. In this case, Kennedy’s amplified grasp of individual agency allows him to put his own desires before others’ independence. Judith Butler details this quest for sovereignty in a workshop on “The Role and Responsibilities of Philosophy in Society” at the University College Dublin (2015). In Butler’s lecture, “Notes on Impressions & Responsiveness,” she argues that “certain versions of the sovereign ‘I’ are . . . thoroughly brittle, often displaying that brittle insistence in symptomatic ways. Storylines ensue. When will that figure break of its own accord, that figure of sovereignty? Or, what will it Garcia 11 have to destroy to support its image of self-sovereignty?” (Butler 00:21:10 – 00:22:05). Kennedy answers these questions by destroying Romy’s life and his own in physical and symbolic terms, proving Butler’s point of necessary violence to support the always erroneous pursuit of the sovereign “I”. Butler’s “I” is like the American Adam in its inevitable failings and its persistent projection of a fantasy to an audience that can never attain it. Kushner distributes the American Adam trope across her male characters to further unpack issues of unisolated choice and free agency. In this case, Kushner demarcates the freedom to act on one’s own volition and the problematic consequences of an unruly Adamic philosophy. The American Adam trope does not maintain that one makes his own decisions without consequences, but Kennedy’s and Ted Kaczynski’s appearances in the novel exemplify the interpretation of autonomy this way―with kinship secondary to the individual’s own concerns. Perhaps Kushner’s most developed example of the fragile border between autonomy and egocentric behavior exists in presenting Henry David Thoreau alongside Ted Kaczynski as (respectively) the hero of civil disobedience and the anarchist-terrorist. INDIVIDUALISM Thoreau, the self-reliant subject observing a battle between ants, and Kaczynski, the loner plotting terrorist attacks, both act on their individual accords and deliver their gospels for self-reliance with conviction. However, the vilification of one over the other lies with his infringement on the individualism―the personhood or Emersonian Garcia 12 “peculiarity” ―of other people. At one point in the novel, Gordon Hauser thinks to himself: “The Ted diaries were mostly concerned with how he lived and what he saw happening in the wilderness around him . . . but Ted would never write this: ‘Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors’” (93). Community distinguishes Thoreau from the isolated, individualistic leanings of Ted Kaczynski. Thoreau saw autonomy for the ways that it connected humans to the universe while celebrating sovereignty unto oneself. Kaczynski, on the other hand, enforced his autonomy by robbing others of theirs. In pursuing autonomous freedom, each subject chases a form of recognition from the surrounding world―an impossible recognition from inside prison walls, and an illusory one from Kennedy, who knew Romy only by her stage name, “Vanessa.” Kennedy’s error in naming only further proves his misinterpretation of personal autonomy in the Adamic vein and the absence of recognition that allows prison to “invisibilize” inmates in Kushner’s language ( Here & Now ). Both the correctional facility and Kennedy himself interpellate Romy against her rejection (by working at the Mars Room ) of all that these figures represent―the 3 conventional, law-bound world of restrictions and “straight world” expectations. Although Kushner never directly compares Romy with Ted Kaczynski, in both cases autonomy persists as their chief preoccupation. Kaczynski expresses: “I emphasize that my motivation is personal revenge on those who deprive or threaten to deprive my own autonomy. I don’t pretend to have any kind of philosophical or moralistic 3 T he outcast Kaczynski, who lives on the margins of society similarly rejects systems. Institutional/national rejection of this person, then, follows the thinking that those who do not subscribe to national conventions are rejected and forced to conform in ways like imprisonment when they have not subscribed to such expectations/aspirations in their free lives. Garcia 13 justification” (275). Similarly, Romy frankly narrates her experience at the Mars Room but reveals frustration when considering the limits of her individual agency. She explains: “Something brewed in me over the years I worked at the Mars Room, sitting on laps, deep into this flawed exchange. This thing in me brewed and foamed. And when I directed it―a decision that was never made; instead, instincts took over―that was it.” (26). Kushner’s fictional world prioritizes individualism so prominently that threats to autonomy initiate an instinctual response. A threat to the freedom of agency strikes something primal within her characters. So, although Romy’s violence seems uncharacteristic, her reaction follows the order of prioritized values in Kushner’s America. I f the life sentence comprises the worst conceivable punishment, individualism must be prized in the collective American mind. Thus, Romy’s two life-sentences offend the governing principles twofold. American literature follows pillar-like tropes like that of the American Adam in its development, shifting cultural details to tailor such illustrations to newer audiences. In Kushner’s recognition of American individualism as it exists in Transcendentalist optimism and modern bleakness, The Mars Room embodies America’s attitudes toward individualism and the culture/ideologies that follow such a cherished value. In Virgin Land , Henry Nash Smith similarly unpacks Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis to explain the shortcomings of “an agrarian philosophy and an agrarian myth” (Smith 259). Smith explains that “a system which revolved about a half-mystical conception of nature and held up as an ideal a rudimentary type of agriculture was powerless to confront issues arising from the advance of technology” (259). As Smith Garcia 14 called for an update on the frontier thesis and as Lewis’ authors of the ironic party walked a middle line between “memory” and “hope,” The Mars Room treads new ground. This alternative does not divorce itself from history (Lewis 91). Rather, it repackages American Adam anxieties by invoking, then inverting its details to ask how—if at all—the trope still captures something about American life or identity. Specifically, this question considers the outcomes of characters that exist outside of innocent beginnings who still inhabit landscapes inspired by that mythic innocence. This prizing of individualism proves its authority in the legal system’s structure which aims to revoke the most valued privileges of a free citizen and to monitor the most damning consequences possible. In Outlaw Women , Bratton et al. expound on the national values that are built into institutions like prison. The authors cite research from “two California carceral therapeutic communities for young women and children” that maintained goals to “[bypass] the social, heading instead through the women’s minds, bodies, and souls” (Haney qtd. in Bratton et al 94). Bratton et al. highlight this research to point to a pattern of emphasis on individuals’ choices rather than the larger social constraints female inmates face as marginalized groups in a white, patriarchal majority. Further, the authors find it “unsurprising that societies like the United States that highly esteem independence and individualism would prioritize these values. . . . Prisons reflect social beliefs and practices that are sometimes so entrenched within a culture as to be invisible” (95). Both Outlaw Women and The Mars Room acknowledge institutional construction as it follows an invisiblized standard of values. Punishment depends on that Garcia 15 which is prized by the majority, and prison structures model this communication between the national mind and its physical development. As an intelligent protagonist and self-reflecting narrator, Romy’s insight and narration reveal the absurdity of normalized values. Explicitly, Romy remarks, “The trouble with San Francisco was that I could never have a future in that city, only a past” (33). Again, in The American Adam , Lewis writes that without a “vision of innocence” to serve as a blank slate for characters, readers would experience a “sterile awareness of evil uninvigorated by a sense of loss” in the fiction (9). The Mars Room seems to realize Lewis’ prediction as it illustrates Romy’s path to prison with no hope of redemption. Still, at second glance, Romy’s position as an informed narrator dredging up her past gives her a unique vantage point from which to unveil the invisibilized “social beliefs and practices” that (according to Outlaw Women ) create national culture. Whereas Thoreau and Kaczynski embody two possible outcomes of exercised independence (private emancipation in Thoreau and aggressive actions in Kaczynski), Romy contains the spectrum of autonomy in a single character and the capacity to understand the illusion of autonomy in her own life as well as others’. Adam embodied an innocent American figure; Romy personifies the inverse of this projection as an American who recognizes the thorny landscapes in both nature and cities, always receiving goodness alongside evil, and understanding individualism united in its dualism. The individual could be violent like Kaczynski or he could act with optimism like Thoreau, and Romy could walk between these borders that uphold an outdated partition of her experience of transgressed binaries. Kushner does not allow Romy a childhood of Garcia 16 innocence that mirrors Adam’s initial form. Rather, just as she paints technology already implicated in nature and individuals caught in the prison system’s inevitable community lifestyle, the author creates a beginning and middle for her protagonist situated during the interminable fall. Romy operates from experience rather than innocence, and this necessarily emerges in her understanding of individualism and the lack of preciousness evident in her narrative voice. At first, by her work in the Mars Room, Romy maintains a private emancipation from societal constraints, but she harbors anger fo r the persistent maintenance of a stage where men could feel that they were the only free agents in power. On several occasions, Kushner describes the complexities of the club, the Mars Room, to clarify the “quandary” of agency that many assume as part of sex work. In an interview with Powell’s Books, the author explained that prison’s strict adherence to rules and constant surveillance differs from the Mars Room, where “it's more like you have to be able to part with this one thing, this one component of what straight people think of as their dignity, and maybe what girls who dance know is not really their dignity” (Walton & Kushner). The quandary for Romy lies with the shattered illusion more so than the realities of sex work and a comparison of entrapment that cheapens this relationship between prison and the Mars Room. Kushner suggests that gender conventions invert the “self-made man” trope at several points in the novel, but the Mars Room as a club displays this dynamic without hesitation. The club’s depicted relationship between men and women contributes to a larger illustration of ideological obstacles in practice. Choice becomes evidence against Garcia 17 women at the convenience of blame. For Romy, the fate of her son, Jackson, results from her “poor choices” (85). Conversely, Kennedy’s choices to actively stalk Romy and disregard her requests, even calling her by the wrong name, are not viewed as repeated disregard for her life in the eyes of the legal system. The fault again lies with Romy, who made the choice to attack “a man who could not walk without two canes,” although this description fails to include Kennedy’s patterned harassment (64). Choice and capital intertwine. Like Dostoevsky (a recurring hint at the vestige of European inheritance), Romy suggests it all “[comes] down to rubles” (265). Those who can afford the illusion at the Mars Room possess agency just as those who can afford competent lawyers possess agency. Although she acted on her own accord and earned a living doing so, the disrespect Romy endured surpassed monetary diminution. Unlike the customers, the flawed system fails to protect Romy; temporary performance seeps into lasting injustice. For the sake of income, the club prioritizes Kennedy’s desires over Romy’s safety and Dostoevsky’s quip on capital reemerges in the text. When Romy requests that Kennedy be kept away from the club, “Dart,” the night manager, replies, “He’s a good customer” (64). Romy narrates, “I was expendable. Men who spent money were not. Kennedy hunted me and didn’t let up,” (64). Moments later, Romy mentions her request to testify before a jury for Kennedy’s stalking and recalls her incompetent public defender’s questions “[a]bout the work [she] did to make a living. About [her] relationship to Kennedy and other customers. About the decision [she] made to pick up a heavy instrument” (64). Romy’s reflection highlights the way in which a culture that prizes individualism and autonomy Garcia 18 can punish her for her own decisions as well as the decisions of others. If one has subjected herself to an inherently dangerous sphere by the “straight world” perspective, her choice to enter that work leaves her culpable for choices that she has not made but which have been acted upon her in that unconventional space. An assertion of one’s self that depends on the recognition of others relates directly to Butler’s point on subjugation’s role as a chaotic influence on the subject and her claim that “what we call independence is always established through a set of formative relations that do not simply fall away as action takes place” (00:26:53-00:27:00). Butler maintains that the “I” that is identified apart from the “you” or the “they” experiences a kind of crisis at “significant shift[s] or ruptures” when the subject must come to grips with 4 himself/herself within the inescapable “matrix of relations” (00:22:53-00:23:23). Butler further explains that the attempt to free oneself—which in the end, can shatter the previously held notion of that individual self—depends on others, which further unpacks the power dynamics of the Mars Room and Romy’s vulnerability because of Kennedy’s purchasing power. Butler argues: It might be that the constituting relations have a certain pattern of breakage in them—that they actually constitute and break us at the same time. . . . What does it mean to require what breaks you if the dependency on those others was once a matter of survival and now continues to function psychically as a condition of survival . . . What does it mean to be 4 “[A]t moments of significant shift or rupture we may not know precisely who we are or what is meant by ‘I’ when we say it. If the ‘I’ is separated from the ‘you’ or indeed the ‘they’—that is, from those without whom the “I” has been unthinkable—then there is doubtless a rather severe disorientation that follows” (“Notes on Impressions & Responsiveness” 22:53-23:15). Garcia 19 fundamentally dependent on those who subjugate you—such that throwing off subjugation imperils your life (or. . . all the conditions that you have understood to ensure your survivability)? Matters become more complex if one makes the break precisely in order to survive, in that sense, breaking with what breaks you. (23:53-24:41) In attempts to exercise agency, Romy engages with an unconventional lifestyle that falls outside of “straight world” expectations. However, the pretense of subjugation at the Mars Room transforms from a mechanism of emancipation to Romy’s actual subjugation 5 by Kennedy’s manipulation. The conflict with Kennedy is, in this way, the unraveling of Romy’s previously unconventional-but-voluntary lifestyle. False subjugation preserved Romy’s conception of herself, but actual subjugation in the events of Kennedy’s harassment forced Romy into another narrative that charts her attempts to survive after “breaking with what breaks [her]” and acting out against Kennedy with physical violence. Although Romy rejects “straight world” expectations, her rejection of “the traditional, the conventional . . . the well-worn paths of conduct” (Lewis 21) leads her to a predator who takes advantage of these absent conventions and eventually forces her into a high-security prison (in “nature,” to the Transcendentalists’ credit) (23). That prison then embodies Michel Foucault’s conception of institutionalization not only for its penal processing, but also for its presence at the center of the Central Valley, a natural 5 “Actual,” because Kennedy attacks Romy’s autonomy and his actions supersede the illusion of subjugation that sustains the Mars Room and Romy’s personal choice to work in this position, thereby exercising her agency. Garcia 20 space that should have been exempt from symptoms of modernity in the American Adam philosophy6. Where John Wayne types exemplify the American Adam as one rejecting a restrictive system and venturing into nature as described by Gary Wills or envisioned by Thoreau and Dickinson, The Mars Room contains characters embarking on individual journeys as well, but always from one system to the next. Romy relates her path to prison through work: I had been a waitress at an IHOP right after I graduated high school. . . . I was waitress 43, and the cooks would call, Forty-three! Your order is up! Which, as I only saw later, had been preparing me for [Stanville]. To work at IHOP, you first go to Walmart or a place like it to get work shoes. Where you see, if you didn’t already know, that most of the adult-sized shoes they sell are for working on construction sites or in hospitals, prisons, restaurants, and schools, and the children’s shoes are starter versions of the same. (171) Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) maps institutions similar to Romy’s thinking, both shaping society through constant surveillance. Specifically, Foucault’s chapter, “Panopticism,” details the relationship of seeing from 6 However, Butler predicts the inescapable conflict that characters face even after rejecting conventional values or behaviors. Again, in “Notes on Impressions & Responsiveness,” she explains that divorcing oneself from identity-shaping norms is possible “only by the intervention of countervailing norms and if [this] can and does happen, it means simply that the matrix of relations that forms the subject is not an integrated and harmonious network but a field of potential disharmony, antagonism, and contest” (00:22:30-00:22:52). In Romy’s case, rejection of the “straight world” finds its attempt at “countervailing norms” in the Mars Room, and Butler’s hypothesis that the norm’s counterpart would remain discordant for the subject (Romy) rings true. Garcia 21 Bentham’s panopticon as a mechanism for an automated power structure. Although Romy makes a case for IHOP and Walmart as preparation for her time at Stanville, the Mars Room most closely resembles the power structures central to the panopticon analysis. Outside of the clear comparison between Foucault’s prison and Kushner’s Stanville, the former’s claim that “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power” seems like an appropriate connection to Romy’s position in the Mars Room (202). Foucault adds that this figure “makes [the constraints of power] play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection (202-203). I do not suggest that Kushner’s work echoes these ideas to reveal Romy as the source of her own imprisonment, but perhaps Foucault’s understanding of a room with observed bodies that know they are being observed compounds the relatedness between the club and the correctional facility. Just as Romy suggests IHOP prepared her for prison, Discipline and Punish repeatedly outlines the pathways that connect institutions like hospitals, prisons, schools, and workplaces to one another. The Mars Room most closely resembles that transition because of the power structure that employees and patrons agree to upon entry. Although the club falls outside of conventional society and it maintains its own “rules,” this does not preclude it from falling outside the consequences of “acceptable” institutions connected to Foucault’s aforementioned network. Garcia 22 Romy’s term, “pretend submission,” aligns with the hypothetical room in the panopticon, although before Kennedy, she recognizes her role as a dancer for consumption and control (85). The protagonist nods to another form of suspended illusion by noting, “The customers we want are those who believe that the girls choose the rhinestones and stilettos because they are the type to wear them, and not because they are merely pretending that type exists” (206). Romy realizes that she can best manipulate the balance of power at the Mars Room if she maintains her role as the private subject and public object while onstage. The character who “becomes the principle of his own subjection” can also be misinterpreted to have chosen his subjection and to have relinquished all agency, as with the prison guards’ perspectives. Regardless, Romy’s position remains unchanged with Kennedy as with the guards at Stanville. That is, she realizes that “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Foucault 201). This sustained surveillance summarizes Romy’s misunderstanding of agency. When she remarks that “The Mars Room was a place where you could do what you wanted; at least I had believed that” (emphasis mine) (25), Romy speaks to Foucault’s point that panopticism is the general principle of a new 'political anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline” (208). Keeping in mind the details of Romy’s life as a poor, single mother and sex worker, Foucault’s writings on the panopticon extend to the eyes of society. In this larger societal picture, Kushner acknowledges the ways in which the privileged have manipulated power structures to achieve their own ends while Romy has Garcia 23 assumed a discipline of serving and keeping private any assertions of agency until Kennedy’s persistent harassment drives her to violence. Readers will note that this crescendo is less like a single event for Romy and more like the conclusion to a series of attacks she endures from childhood to the present. After a violent collision with the faulty ideology of individualism, Romy must then reconcile her individual self again in prison, this time in its stark image of inescapable collectivity. NATURE & TECHNOLOGY Romy’s narrative spans her past in gritty San Francisco to her present and future in the Central Valley’s natural landscape. However, cosmopolitanism seems to afford Romy her agency (until Kennedy), and the natural world lies dormant in bleak language with the prison as a cement representation of inescapable social systems. Romy’s view of the land includes “a brutal, flat, machined landscape . . . thick with drifting topsoil and other pollutants from farm equipment and oil refineries” (217). Transcendentalist assertions that man made destruction bubbles in containers like cities and eludes wilderness fails to satisfy the nation’s contemporary state of urban and natural intertwinement. Stanville, overrun by “dollar stores, gas stations that serve as liquor outlets, coin op laundry,” and boarded-up businesses, has fertilizer-infected air and poisoned water (91). Throughout its description, the city is marked as “synonymous with prison. Like Corcoran is, and Chino, Delano and Chowchilla and Avenal, Susanville and San Quentin, scores of towns that house prisons and share a name, up and down the state” (91). Garcia 24 Kushner supplements the infiltration of technology (industrial agriculture specifically) with the town’s relegation to host prisons as its chief duty. Thus, the author compounds the despair of a disillusioned American Adam with a landscape that is not even fit for people beyond prison walls. The destruction experienced in the Central Valley as in several other California cities surpasses a violation of nature and points to the carceral system as a primary contributor to our national geography. Not nature, not people, but institutions claim the land, enveloping the technology which once enveloped nature and agitated the American Adam psyche. Kushner’s decision to paint such manmade institutions as they bleed into the natural world implicates readers in Romy’s tone of frankness and hardening against the unforgiving evils that punctuated her life leading up to prison. Conflated nature and evil also prime us for the novel’s consideration of duality in guilt against innocence, and optimistic individual lives against an individual life endured in service to the state. At the end of The Mars Room , Romy silently responds to the saying “of life gone off the rails,” thinking: “the life is the rails and I was in the mountains I dreamed of from the yard. I was in them, but nothing stays what you see from far away when you get up close” (335). Now in the mountains, the expectations alongside the American Adam disintegrate and nature appears as imprisoned as the Stanville inmates are in the Central Valley. The visions afforded by distance fail to materialize in the optimist’s tradition because nature does not permanently restore Romy’s individual life. Instead, Kushner exposes the mythic association of nature-as-redeemer, again emphasizing a trope that has been naturalized into a national mindset. Garcia 25 While she is cornered after the attempted escape, Romy recalls swimming as a child: “We swam in our clothes. Death was not in our future. No person lives in the future. The present, the present, the present. Life keeps on being that” (335). At this point in the novel, Romy’s thinking patterns convey a disorienting transformation that suggest further perpetuation of the trope/myths that failed her even as she upended their circumstances in her “unconventional” lifestyle. Where she once declared she had only the past to live through, she now asserts the persistence of the present. When she recalled a childhood of violence and disappointment, she now thinks, “There are some good people out there. Some really good people” (335). Romy realized her lack of agency outside of Stanville and Button Sanchez’s daughter being born into a system that might lead her to the same fate, but she expresses, “Yes I think I’m special. That’s on account of me being myself” (335). This sudden stream of declarations arrives in the last two pages of the novel, but its showcasing of Adam-like aspirations reiterates the trope’s fantasy, which characters can intellectualize as idealism but which also continues to construct reality from institutional levels to individual mindsets. Butler argues “that “the ‘I’ may undergo radically conflicting responses as a consequence of its rupture with those formative relations [(influences from beings that are the non-I .)] [The ‘I’] will not survive. Only with such a rupture does it now stand a chance to survive” (00:24:43-00:24:54). The myth of an “I,” the sovereign American Adam, can only flourish for Romy after Kennedy’s usurpation of her agency. The “rupture” of this event violently upended Romy’s aspirations as the conventional restrictions she sought to escape forced her into the larger Adamic mindset. Garcia 26 Romy could identify herself within a collective and find agency in spaces that almost directly inverted American Adam expectations. However, Kennedy’s role as that “rupture” in Romy’s inverted American Adam existence leads her into the typified version of this very trope. Kushner’s inverted American Adam experiences the trope backwards. Romy remains disillusioned before Stanville, but her proverbial and physical crash with Kennedy forces her into Butler’s “matrix of relations”―the non-Romy characters/forces that construct her identity. After Kennedy’s interruption and Romy’s escape to the woods, the protagonist hints at a newfound subscription to the American Adam myth that, for sheltered, unindividuated characters like Kennedy himself, Gordon Hauser, and the Stanville guards, emerges as the calibration point for institutions and the larger nation. Beyond the presentation and transgression of binaries, Kushner maps the destruction that comes to her protagonist because Romy, as an inverted character of the majority’s fantasy, inhabits a world with its systems automatically oriented against her unconventional values and lifestyle. The American Adam as a trope allows individuals to believe they can assert some agency against the entropic whirl of disillusionment that proves the self is constantly upended and informed by subjects that are not that self. After a novel-length series of reconciliation with an unforgiving setting, Romy’s life-sentences force her to live in a landscape that opposes everything her culture has taught her to value. This is a traumatic event, even for a protagonist like Romy whose pre-incarcerated life thrived in unconventional spaces. Romy’s life outside of conventional restraints was forced back into convention by Kennedy’s actions, thus subjecting her to those very Garcia 27 restraints which she avoided in her private life. In this conventional realm of lawyers and prisons and oppressive bureaucratic symbols, Romy is then catapulted into her conclusion, which is to say, into a necessary assumption of American Adam aspirations of a “sovereign ‘I’” because of the stronghold that tropes like the American Adam have asserted on the nation’s development. Navigating historical dichotomies in literature leads us to understand the American engine that is individualism: the zenith for human life, when manipulated: the most daunting punishment, and because of this range: the value that underpins the justice system and informs self-conception. Kushner maps the architectural influence of prized individualism and agency on institutions and power relations among people (while also considering factors like race, class, and gender). The club, The Mars Room, functions as a place unbound by the typical social conventions and the rigidity that follows them, but its emancipation from “the straight world” avoids the Transcendentalists’ vision of freedom, transporting Romy to a natural landscape, but one that has been exploited and later abandoned by humans for machinery and a faceless institution that “invisibilizes” individuals from society. In Kushner’s conclusion, which explodes previously held binaries, the inverted American Adam presents a protagonist borne of historical restrictions who transgresses the circumstances that, at first glance, Kushner invokes. The Mars Room embodies contemporaneity by utilizing a canonical trope like the American Adam to spotlight the evolution of previously impermeable ideals and the constant failures or endings of entrapment for the trope’s characters. This conclusion (almost comically) aligns with a Garcia 28 tradition of Russian Realist literature and inevitable entrapment. Characters attempt to circumnavigate systems only to find that, without fail, these systems construct their realities. The mission of complete self-sovereignty will always fail, but its persistence as a worthy caus e or core characteristic of a national identity demonstrates the ego-dissolution that comes from an interruption of the expected trajectories of a life based on tropes and legends. The myth must persist to provide an illusion of autonomy against the realization that one is not the sole arbiter of his/her surrounding world or even his/her own self/conceptions of self. After all, the alternative for such non-subscribers might be a facility dedicated to more concrete forms of imprisonment, conformity, and correction . Garcia 29 Works Cited Allardice, Lisa. “‘The Mars Room’ by Rachel Kushner Review― What It Means to Be Poor and Female in America.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 20 June 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/20/the-mars-room-rachel-kushner-review. Accessed 7 May 2019. Butler, Judith. “Judith Butler - The Difference of Philosophy (2015) | Notes on Impressions & Responsiveness.” YouTube , uploaded by University College Dublin, 6 Mar. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WecaTBx64p0. Accessed 29 Nov. 2019. Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison . Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage-Random House, 1977. Kim, Mina. “‘The Mars Room' Tells Story Of Those 'Invisiblized' By California's Criminal Justice System.” Here & Now , interviewed by Mina Kim, hosted by Robin Young and Jeremy Hobson, National Public Radio, 3 May 2018. Transcript, www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/05/03/rachel-kushner-the-mars-room. Accessed 6 May 2019. Kushner, Rachel. The Mars Room . Scribner, 2018. Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century . The U of Chicago P, 1955. Garcia 30 Rhodes, Emily. “The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner—Life behind Bars’” The Financial Times , 22 Jun 2018, www.ft.com/content/2cb3c362-7ec3-11e8-af48-190d103e32a4. Accessed 7 May 2019. Lorentzen, Christian. “What Is Missing from Rachel Kushner’s New ‘The Mars Room?’ Besides Plot.” Vulture , New York Media, 2 May 2018, www.vulture.com/2018/05/whats-missing-from-rachel-kushners-new-the-mars-ro om.html. Accessed 7 May 2019. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America . Oxford UP, 2000. Mitchell, Jonathan. Revisions of the American Adam: Innocence, Identity and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America . Continuum, 2011. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=837700&site=e host-live. Accessed 16 May 2019. Noble, David W. The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden: The Central Myth in the American Novel Since 1830 . George Braziller, 1968. Pâtea, Viorica, and María Eugenia Díaz. Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam . Ediciones Universidad De Salamanca, 2001. “Rachel Kushner: ‘The Mars Room.’” YouTube , uploaded by Wheeler Centre, 30 May 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NEE0eZg5Xo. Accessed 1 Oct. 2019. Garcia 31 Schwartz, Madeleine. “Notes from the Inside,” The New York Review of Books , NYREV, 10 May 2018, www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/10/rachel-kushner-notes-from-inside/. Accessed 7 May 2019. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: the American West as Symbol and Myth . Harvard UP, 2009. Walton, Rhianna, and Rachel Kushner. “Powell's Interview: Rachel Kushner, Author of 'The Mars Room'.” Powell's , Powell's City of Books, 1 May 2018, www.powells.com/post/interviews/powells-interview-rachel-kushner-author-of-th e-mars-room. Accessed 7 May 2019. Wills, Gary. “American Adam.” The New York Review of Books , NYREV, 6 Mar. 1997, www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/03/06/american-adam/. Accessed 6 May 2019.