Shehata 1

Miraf Shehata

Professor Rodrick

English 115

19 November 2018

The Truth About Women As Objects

Play it As it Lays by Joan Didion is an episodic novel set in the late 1960s about Maria

Wyeth’s search for meaning. The novel follows Maria through her loss and regaining of identity

in a patriarchal society where she has been labeled as her father’s daughter, as sex object, and as

“wife”. Her roles and identity are constantly being defined by the male world. Didion uses

Maria’s experiences and lack of control over her own life to portray women’s position in a

patriarchal society.

The story begins with Maria confined in a psychiatric hospital. It is mainly from her point

of view that we learn the details of the journey that led her there. The first three chapters of the

novel are told from the viewpoints of Maria, Carter, and Helene, respectively, and give the

reader their accounts of Maria and what went wrong in her life. The following chapters are a

series of fragmented episodes told from Maria’s point of view and are, collectively, a flashback

chronicling her life in the year before her breakdown. Through these flashbacks, we learn of the

trials Maria went through including her divorce from her husband Carter Lang, the

insitutionalizement of her disabled daughter Kate, and the abortion she’s forced to have, among

many other tribulations that made her sick.

The setting in which Maria plays out her story is a wasteland motif operating in a

patriarchal framework. She is portrayed, not as her own individual person, but as property of
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male figures in her life. As a child, she was her father’s daughter. She was born in Reno, Nevada

but had to move after her father lost the Reno house in a private game. Because of her father’s

gambling habits, she had to leave her hometown and move to Silver Wells, which was a ghost

town. There were only 28 people living in the town at the time and very few places to go. Even

her mother was unhappy living in that town. She joked that her and Maria would leave and open

a hash house when they got sick of them all. When Maria’s father suggested they open it on

Route 95 (in Silvers Wells), Maria’s mother said “Not on 95, Somewhere else”. Her mother

eventually left and ran her car off the highway outside Tonopah, where her body was torn up by

coyotes. The conversation Maria had with Benny Austin the last time she saw her mother leads

us to believe that her mother intentionally killed herself because she was depressed and wanted

an escape from Silver Wells. Like Maria, her mother was not in control of her life. She was

merely brought along as her husband pursued his dream of making Silver Wells a tourist

attraction and she was miserable. The grief Maria felt over her mother’s death was another factor

that led to her breakdown.

Throughout the novel, Maria is used and labeled as a sex object. The

reason she becomes a model and actress is because in a

male-dominated society there is a market for attractiveness. She is

admired for her beauty and thin figure, and she is sexualised by the

men she encounters. Even in her films, she is exploited and cast as

an object of sexual desire. Carter casts her as such in two of his short

films. The first one invasively documents every fact of Maria’s life

for a few days, giving her no privacy; the second features her being
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gang-raped. When Maria asked a clerk at the Sands about directions to a party, he assumed she

was a prostitute. And when she tried to help out a woman at Ralph’s who was struggling with

mental illness, the woman yelled at her to get her “whore’s hands” off of her. Being portrayed

and labeled this way, Maria is mechanized into being an object, a body instead of a woman.

Like her role as a sex object, Maria’s role as “wife” is largely handed down to her by a

society that often views married women as their husbands’ wives rather than as unique and

separate individuals. Maria is subjected to Carter’s direction not only in the films but also in her

role as a wife. Being a wife is specifically upsetting for Maria because it nullifies her own

existence. In spite of her own profession, she discovers herself being interpreted only in

connection to her husband. When Maria went to visit her agent, an actor in the elevator gave her

a look “charged with sexual appreciation, meant not for Maria herself but for Carter Lang's wife”

(Didion 14). People often referred to her as Mrs. Lang, even though she never saw herself that

way and only as Maria Wyeth. Even when Carter had left, he had a hold over her life and her

actions. It was him who institutionalized Kate, separating Maria from the thing that mattered

most to her. It was him who forced her to have an abortion, threatening to take Kate away if she

didn’t. When he was around, he constantly mistreated her, both verbally and physically. Helene

testified, during their divorce hearing, that Carter had repeatedly struck and humiliated Mariya

on multiple occasions. Sometimes he would even go as far as to tell her to kill herself. This type

of abusive behavior was not only between Maria and Carter. Several women were portrayed as

subjects of abuse throughout the novel. BZ beat up Helene on one occasion and a male actor

named Harrison beat up another actress Susannah Woods and both times it was normalized by
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the people who witnessed it. No one reacted or tried to put a stop to it. The recurrence of this

abuse highlights the misogyny that women face in a patriarchal society.

Even the sexual situations that occurred throughout the novel were misogynistic. The first

was when Maria witnessed BZ beat Helene during some kind of sadist sexual situation. The

second was when Maria was having sex with an actor and he said, “Don’t move. ​I said don’t

move”​. The way this dialogue was written led us to believe that Maria was struggling or trying to

pull away and he had to keep telling her not to move and maybe restrained her to keep her from

moving. Another time, Ivan Costello comes to visit Maria and he wants to have sex. She’s not

interested and she tries to leave. He says, “You aren’t going anywhere. Don’t tell me no.” She

says no again and he said, “All right. Fight me. You’ll like it better that way anyway”. He forced

her into having sex with him even though she said no several times.

Maria is a woman in the world of a man; a victim of abuse and subordination. Women are

perceived as inferior and are treated as such. As Simone de Beauvoir says in her book “The

Second Sex”, men try to control women because they are “very well pleased to remain the

sovereign subject, the absolute superior, the essential being; (they) refuse to accept (their)

companion as an equal in any concrete way.” BZ was homosexual and his relationship with

Helene was forced, but he was upset when he lost her to Carter because she was the only thing in

his life that he had control of. When Helen left with Carter, he had officially lost control of

everything, which is what made him so upset. Males like to assert their dominance by controlling

women and trying to keep them in check. That is why society operates as a patriarchy, always

attempting, and still today succeeding, to keep women in a lower position than men.
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Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de. ​The Second Sex.​ Vintage Classic, 2015

Didion, Joan. ​Play It as It Lays.​ Fourth Estate, 2011.

Didion, Joan. “Play It As It Lays.” ​Bureauoftrade.com​,

s3.amazonaws.com/bureau-of-trade/p/2012/11/21/iplay-it-as-it-laysi-by-joan-didion-1973-640.jp

g.

Winnette, Colin. “Nicholas Rombes on Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays.” ​Electric

Literature,​ Electric Literature, 14 Nov. 2014,

electricliterature.com/nicholas-rombes-on-joan-didions-play-it-as-it-lays-429af610d73.