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Julian Remy

Professor Rodrick

English 115

16 November 2018

Maria’s Downfall

The novel Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion illustrates the life of Maria Wyeth, a woman

who grew up in Silver Wells, Nevada and moved to Los Angeles as an adult. She moved because

she married Carter, her ex-husband. Carter is a filmmaker and Maria is an actress, and because of

their professions they built a relationship with another filmmaker friend of Carter’s, BZ. BZ is

married to a woman named Helene, who also became friends with Maria and Carter. Throughout

the novel, the relationships between Maria and the rest of these characters evolved with

unpleasant outcomes. Maria was conflicted in relationships throughout the story. She grew to

love a man named Les Goodwin who was married to Felicia, so she and Les couldn’t be

together. Maria married Carter because she felt like he was the only man who would care for her

if something went wrong because she knew he saw her as valuable in his work. After Maria’s

breakup with Carter, she began to lose herself and became a full on drug addict and a prostitute

for a short time. Both depressed, BZ and Maria become best friends because they relate in both

struggling with identity. Unfortunately this leads to BZ’s drug-induced suicide that Maria

allowed to happen. Maria’s relationships with men, the loss of her parents and unborn child, and

her inability to see her daughter Kate develop the themes of the novel--identity, dehumanization,

and the struggle for happiness in life. The effects of these hardships that Maria faced led her to ,

have a complete mental breakdown which she didn’t recover from.

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Maria struggled with finding her identity because she let men control her decisions. For

example, when Maria became pregnant, Carter decided what she would do with the baby. “I’m

not promising anything,” Carter told her after she asked if their agreement for her to keep Kate if

she aborted the baby would hold up (Didion 55). Basically, Carter never ensured that he would

keep up his end of the deal even though in reality Kate was both his and Maria’s child. Maria

doesn’t make any attempt to stand up for herself and assert her value or respect in their

relationship because she had low self-esteem, so she allowed Carter to take control of the

situation. As a result of Maria not being confident in herself she submitted to Carter's wishes and

got the abortion. In turn, getting the abortion affected her mentally. This brought her to revisit

how her mother had tragically died--eaten by coyotes. Soon after she had nightmares about

plumbers coming into her home and messing with the pipes in her house to that grey water

would spurt out of the sinks. She was afraid to ask them what they found in the pipes because she

was convinced that it was “hacked pieces of human flesh” (Didion 97). This bad dream is

reflective of not only the abortion but her mother’s death also. Maria felt guilty for having the

abortion because of her lack of control over her decisions. She felt that she owed it to her baby to

keep her alive and perform her maternal duty because she lost her mother to a situation that she

couldn’t help. Between Carter’s control over her and losing her mom, Maria never felt

comfortable with leading her own life. Because of that she was unable to find her identity and

she grew numb to the world around her.

Dehumanization is expressed through the way that men objectify Maria in the novel.

Maria is objectified in in sex and in her liberty throughout the story. The most explicit example

of Maria being objectified was when she left the party with Johnny Waters. As they were having
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sex, he told her “don’t move”. He repeated himself saying “I said don’t move,” and then

continued to say “wake me up in three hours with your tongue” (Didion 153). Due to Didion’s

style of writing what happened to Maria wasn’t explicit, but Maria was raped. She ended up

stealing Waters’s car after he fell asleep so she could get away from him. The time period

reflects an era where it was common for men to use women and get away with it, because

afterwards Maria was arrested and taken to jail for stealing Waters’s car. He still called her after

the incident and tried to justify what he did by saying she never told him who she was. Waters

didn’t even call with intent to apologize, so it was clear that he didn’t view Maria as a woman

who was of equal status and value as him, because he would have done the same thing to the

next actress that didn’t tell him who she was. Therefore, Waters dehumanized her. To continue,

an example discrimination against women during this time period is the inability for them to use

and access birth control. Kate McLaughlin at CNN explains that “​the pill was illegal in some

states and could be prescribed only to married women for purposes of family planning...Some of

those opposed said oral contraceptives were immoral, promoted prostitution and were

tantamount to abortion” (McLaughlin).​ This makes it easy to see how many men didn’t view

women as having an equal role in sex.The information from McLaughlin reflects that men had a

structured advantage over women through law. The fact that women were unable to get on birth

control in some states shows that men abused privilege back then, and it cosigns the role that

Carter played in the novel. He made decisions for Maria, as if she couldn’t herself or it wasn’t

her place to. Because Waters used Maria as an object, paired with men’s attitudes towards birth

control is a clear representation of the way that women were dehumanized back then. For Maria,

she began to see herself as a mere object, which contributed to her losing herself.
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The final theme in the novel is struggle for happiness in life. This theme develops

throughout the story but is most apparent in the end of the book. Didion shows this through

Maria’s relationships with Les Goodwin and Benny Austin. Initially, it seems as if Les Goodwin

would be the one man to love and treat her right, but the reader finds out that his marriage will

prevent any public or official relationship between him and Maria. Towards the end of the novel,

Maria and Les Goodwin spent two days together, taking a drive to the coast of California before

shacking up in a hotel room in Morro Bay for the night. Maria was suggesting date ideas for the

two of them in the morning, and then Les said he was going to call Felicia. Maria cried because

she felt that “there’s no point in {their] doing any of those things,” (Didion 134). Les’s calling

Felicia brought Maria back to reality in a sense, because she realized that even if she and Les

wanted to be with each other it would never happen. Maria could’t help to let her emotions out

by crying because she actually felt loved when being with Les Goodwin. Unfortunately, it was a

continuing struggle for her because a relationship with Les wouldn’t have been possible. The

next example of the search for love isn’t found in an intimate or sexual relationship for Maria,

but a family relationship. As stated earlier, Marias losses of family members affected her sense

of identity, but it also made her long for any connection to family that she could find. Maria ran

into Benny Austin, a close family friend of her parents, at Larry Kulik’s hotel. They talked and

he ended up giving her his phone number and P.O. box number, but later when she tried to

contact him the number was out of service and the box belonged to someone else. Benny most

likely changed his contact information because he didn’t want to have to deal with the pain of

reconnecting with Maria after her parents passed. From the way they met and how she was

looking he probably figured that she had fallen on hard times and become a prostitute or an
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addict (both of which she was) and she would want him to help her break free of that situation.

Furthermore, after Maria left the hotel and shortly after she failed to reach Benny two men and a

girl were trying to decipher Maria’s age, one calling her “a good thirty-six,” even though she was

thirty (). Benny knew that she would consider him her last family left, so he probably felt like

things would be easier for him without having her in his life. This is the point where Maria began

to fall into serious depression. She stayed in Las Vegas for two weeks roaming around in a daze,

until she ran into Freddy Chaikin. He asked her to have sex with an associate of his in exchange

for bailing her out of jail when she stole Johnny Waters’s car. She didn’t even try to decline the

request, she attempted to go to Freddy’s associate’s hotel room but was denied by the attendant.

This behavior represents Maria losing all of her self-esteem. In the abortion situation with Carter

she at least tried to imagine herself living a happy life with Kate and her newborn, but at in this

later segment of the book it's shown that she views had begun to give up on happiness. As the

story finishes out, Maria ceases to care about anything in life. While they were on the desert,

Maria and BZ were together in the motel room. Maria was clearly depressed and not in the mood

to talk, but BZ kept insisting on a conversation. He said to her “tell me what matters,” and she

bluntly responded “Nothing” (Didion 202). A couple days later, BZ brought pills to Maria’s

hotel room. They laid in bed together as he told her she was “still playing,” and that eventually

she “wont feel like playing anymore” (Didion 212). BZ says this to Maria to describe life as a

parallel to a game. In all games, you play to have fun but when you no longer have fun playing

you stop. In their cases, they both stopped having fun in life because they couldn’t find

happiness, and because of that BZ chose suicide. Similarities between Maria’s life and others can

be observed in the story of Amy Winehouse. Barry Nicholson from NME interviewed Nick
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Shymansky, Winehouse’s first manager. Shymansky explained that Blake Fielder-Civil, Amy’s

ex- boyfriend played a significant role in her decline in health. Shymansky says that Civil

“introduced Winehouse to crack and heroin, possibly with the intent of ensuring she became

dependent on them and, by extension, him” (Nicolson). Although Carter didn’t necessarily get

Maria on drugs, he was controlling of her in the same aspect that Civil was with Winehouse.

Carter used manipulation in the abortion situation to put himself in a position where he could

control her, and because of that Maria used drugs. She and Winehouse were similar in the sense

that they both let men manipulate their lives and affect their happiness, so they turned to drug

use. Going back to BZ’s death , the only thing keeping Maria alive was the chance that she could

get custody over Kate. Other than that, she was just walking dead.

To conclude, Maria Wyeth was a woman who’s life took an unexpected turn. The loss of

her parents forced her into a life without guidance, and she was unable to handle things on her

own. Instead, she let the men in her life make decisions for her and serve as her guides to how

she lived her life, so that lowered her self-esteem. Maria searched for love in many of the men

that she had sexual relations with, but Les Goodwin was the only man who showed her love.

Unable to be happy, Maria began to give up on herself entirely, she began to prostitute herself

for a short period of time, in complement to her addiction to barbiturates. She quickly became

numb to the world around her, she let her best friend kill himself and gave up on searching for

happiness. When all was said and done, Maria failed to find herself. She thought of herself as a

permanent tool and disconnected from everything around her, leaving her unhappy but uncaring

in a mental institution.
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Works Cited

Didion, Joan. ​Play It As It Lays.​ New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.

McLaughlin, Katie. “5 Things Women Couldn't Do in the 1960s.” ​CNN​, Cable News Network,

25 Aug. 2014, ​www.cnn.com/2014/08/07/living/sixties-women-5-things/index.html​.

Nicolson, Barry. “A Most Modern Tragedy: Why We're All To Blame For The Death Of Amy

Winehouse.” ​NME,​ TI Media Limited, 23 July 2018,

www.nme.com/features/a-most-modern-tragedy-why-were-all-to-blame-for-the-death-of-amy-wi

nehouse-756784.