Shut Me Up in Prose by
Maithy Vu; The Women's Mind in Short Story Form
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Shut Me Up in Prose by Mathy Vu is an anthology that brilliantly explores the struggles that women face including love, family, careers, appearance, gender identity, sexuality, relationships, emotions, mental health, fear, identity struggles, self-reflection, and authenticity. It uses various styles and genres from Thrillers, Mysteries, Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical, and Contemporary Fiction to explore the wide tapestry of the female experience. It truly says a lot about women and uses many unique and colorful voices to say it.
“Little Liability”
The Narrator ruminates about her close friend, Marion who she first met as a child and helped her through a difficult past. Now she’s afraid that Marion’s influence is going too far particularly with her new relationship.
It’s pretty easy to guess the twist but the story is less concerned with who Marion actually is than how much influence that she has on the Narrator’s. She alternates between admiration and disgust at Marion and her behavior.
The Narrator recalls times when Marion protected her from her abusive father, or when she encouraged her to pursue her art passion. However she also had a negative influence on the Narrator by interfering with her relationship then encouraging the Narrator to engage in self-harm and other toxic behaviors during the explosive aftermath.
A new relationship makes The Narrator’s link to Marion even more questionable and concerning. She tolerated Marion’s existence and even thrived from it when it was just the two of them. Now she is forced to see it through another’s eyes and what was once creative and eccentric is now intrusive and troubling. It makes her unable to socialize with others because she is afraid of Marion’s unpredictability. She wants a stable life and Marion can’t give that to her.
There is another aspect to Marion in the story. Marion is part of The Narrator’s psyche that she tries to repress, tries to fit her into a form and personality, something that can be contained and hidden when she doesn’t want her to appear. What she fails to account for is that The Narrator can’t suppress Marion because she would be suppressing a part of herself. The part that is authentic and alive. She tries to conform to the roles others expect her to but The Narrator can only live a half life without her.
It’s worth noting that the short story is written in second person addressing The Narrator as “you.” It involves the Reader saying that we are sometimes filled with the same nervousness and insecurities. We feel split in more than one part and have to play various roles. We have a shadow self that can’t always be hidden inside us. We all have that aspect and have to balance it out with the other side of ourselves. We are Marion, but we are also The Narrator.
“Gumball on a Sunny Day”
A little girl, Daisie, goes through a typical day. While on her own at a grocery store she meets a boy who puts her in an ambiguously ominous situation.
This story is a tight Thriller that illustrates a reality that females must face every day even as young as childhood. Daisie’s story is a microcosm of those experiences. Her story appears to have a feeling of warmth in childhood nostalgia but it is tinged with adult cynicism.
Daisie is self-conscious and preoccupied about her bad posture, stringy hair, and especially her pink braces which embarrass her. Kids make fun of her mistakes and accidents and even when they don’t, Daisie imagines that they are judging her. When her art class is assigned to paint their worst fears, Daisie draws her adult self with braces.
Through Daisie’s experience, we see the anxieties that start in childhood and never disappear in adulthood. Women especially have these fears about their appearance, weight, manner of dress, behavior, emotions, and thoughts.
With social media those fears have only multiplied as we are constantly monitored not only by people in our inner circle but everyone in our networks, our platforms, and around the world. Those standards of perfection begin when we are little girls wearing braces, having bad backs, and running fingers through our stringy messy hair.
There’s another aspect in Daisie’s journey and here’s where the dangerous omens really come into play. Daisie is made to walk home alone when her father neglects to pick her up. The little boy feigns friendship with her by complimenting her, talking about shared interests, then kisses her.
While sweet on the surface, there is something off about this meeting. The boy is too polite and too forward to someone who should be a complete stranger, especially when he goes in for the kiss. That little thought of “this isn’t right” grows when the boy’s father shows up, offers the girl a ride home, and while in the car the girl is purposely kept from listening to their conversation.
This is something else that women learn as they age, how dangerous the world can be. Daisie learns that there are many men who will hurt her either by neglect, force, or coercion. In the space of a few pages, she is hurt and abandoned by three men in her life, neglected by her father, manipulated by the boy, and murdered by his father.
Oddly enough, the boy is also learning from his father how to trap women with compliments, how to isolate and dominate them, then how to dispose of them. This is even shown at the end when the boy and the man find a new target to pursue. It is a vicious cycle of patriarchal abuse that objectifies, controls, and destroys women then moves onto another generation.
“The Underwater Circus”
The Narrator recounts her time at an underwater circus where she donned a mermaid costume and did water acrobatics for the audience. She recalls several members of the crew and the power struggle between the ringmaster and a former mermaid/seamstress who the other dancers call “Mama.”
This story is a Fantasy allegory about the power struggles between men and women. The Underwater Circus is a bit of wish fulfillment between the performers and the audience. They want to see mermaids, otherworldly creatures so the circus makes that happen. They sell a fantasy that the people buy and particularly the men can ogle over.
The circus is a fantasy that holds everyone under their spell. The mermaids are similar to singers, actresses, models, and influencers who sell an image. That image is to be beautiful, sexy, alluring, seductive, ethereal, and unattainable. Like they come from another world that one can imagine but never approach.
It’s no coincidence that the performers are dressed as mermaids. In folklore, mermaids are beautiful sea creatures who captivate men while luring them to their deaths. They enchant them by their appearance and sexuality. They are similar to sirens but sirens lure men with their voices not their appearance.
It’s also often speculated that sirens use their skills to protect their territory to keep men away but men can’t resist. Mermaids seem to have no other motive than to draw men in with their allure playing into their fantasies and expectations. This is revealed in the line (one of the most honest lines in the entire anthology): “When they exist for them, we are called mermaids. When we live for ourselves, they call us sirens.” Both are considered fatal but mermaids are thought of as seductresses and sirens are thought of as monsters.
This dichotomy of how the male gaze hovers between accepting mermaids but rejecting sirens comes in the exchanges between the Ringmaster and the performers. To him they are to be perfect, ethereal, and inhuman. If they show human frailties like disfiguration, pregnancy, marriage, aging, illness, anger, or defiance, then they are removed. They are products, packages to sell so he can profit off their beauty and the illusion that he creates through them. They can’t show personality, can’t be imperfect, can’t go through regular lifestyle changes, can’t challenge authority, can’t be human.
There is one character that stands up to the Ringmaster. That is Mama formerly known as Nova the Sea Nymph. She sold the fantasy as well as she started in the circus when she was very young. She became a legend until her age caught up with her and worked behind the scenes. She understands the importance of putting on a show and maintaining the illusion but not at the expense of the performers. She defends them when they are abused, provides comfort when their jobs are threatened, and is a voice of opposition towards their employer. She sees what he does not, that they are women and human beings, not unreal creatures from mythology.
Mama’s protective nature towards the girls comes forward in a moment when drunken revellers attack the circus in a frantic mob. The fantasy is no longer enough and now these men won’t control their urges. They want the reality and will possess the mermaids to get it. They stop when the women prove to be a powerful force and fight them back, in effect freeing themselves.
With Mama, they are no longer passive participants. They actively control the narrative, the fantasy that they are selling. Instead of being objects to be ogled and dominated, they inspire girls and their mothers to be confident, strong, and look inward. When they do make themselves up, it’s in front of one another as a private reflection. Their beauty is for themselves, their choices, and their own gaze not others.
“Sage in Security”
In a future world that is divided by different color cards, The Narrator is offered her dream job in security analysis. Unfortunately, it becomes a nightmarish situation when she wakes up with a different face and everyone assumes that she is someone else.
There is something Kafkaesque about this story of an office setting that is so dehumanized that they recognize someone not through their appearance but their card identification. It’s pretty on the nose but Science Fiction often turns our daily lives into something harsher and darker than the world that we already live in.
Everyone is separated by color card identification. It’s implied that the color cards determine people’s education, training, careers, and social status. Yellows for example are artists, writers, and other creative professions. There are even different identifications according to shades. While The Narrator is a green and works for a tech company, they are still divided.
As a Sage, the Narrator is put in a top level security system and is told that there is a hierarchy. Emeralds are on top as the executives. Sages are right under them as security. Limes are in admin/clerical, Viridian are in supplies. Olives do the manual grunt work. People are put in their places and are expected to fit a specific role. Similar to other structured hierarchies like the Brain Waves in Brave New World or the District Numbers in The Hunger Games, the sorting is arbitrary but is an attempt to define a person and fit them into a preselected box. Is it any more arbitrary than minimizing someone's abilities by skin color, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or gender identity?
The Narrator goes through a transformation as she starts her job. She doesn’t recognize her own face when she looks in the mirror. Her colleagues call her by another name that isn’t hers and her card switches green shades from sage to olive. It is never outright stated why this change occurs. It may be a part of her job that she was never told. During the interview, she is rushed through signing a contract so there could be some amendment that states her identity becomes theirs and through some futuristic technology, they are allowed to change it however they see fit.
There are other possibilities. Since the transformation is not observed by anyone else but her, it could be a manifestation of her own mind. It could be a projection of her nerves brought on by Imposter Syndrome. She is clearly apprehensive at her interview and worried about making a good impression. On her first tour of the place, she second guesses her dress, her reactions, her gestures, and her tone. She has to put up an appearance and wear another face in her workplace relationship. She feels like she doesn’t belong so she thinks of herself as a separate person. This fear could now be real.
The strongest possibility is that the dilemma doesn’t lie in her anxiety about her changed face, but how her co-workers react to it. The answer is they don’t. She is worried that they might call security or freak out but that doesn’t happen. She goes to meetings, gives her reports, meets the bosses, and shares gossip with her colleagues like it’s any given Tuesday. They don’t notice. Granted, she’s a new employee and they might not fully remember her yet, but more than likely they don’t notice her because they are conditioned not to.
It doesn’t matter who she is personally as long as the work gets done. They don’t even bother to memorize her face or her name so she could be anyone to them. They just see the color card which conforms to their expectations. She is part of an inhuman system that devalues her. Her identity, her personality, her friendships are what makes her human. To society however, The Narrator is just a warm body who could be anybody as long as the work gets done.
“The Daylily Darling”
Aster, a young woman has a strange birth defect of wildflowers growing out of her face. She works in her mother’s theatre where Antoinette, a singer with the same defect, makes her debut.
This story is very similar to that of the many real life freak show performers of the 19th and 20th century whose oddities made them physically different such as Charles Stratton, Gen. Tom Thumb a Little Person, Chang and Eng Bunker conjoined twins, Robert Wadlow the world’s tallest man, Joseph Merrick, The Elephant Man who had neurofibromatosis, and Annie Jones, a singer with extreme hirsutism. They were often limited with their options: forced into hiding and exile by their families, submit to constructive surgeries when it was available, or accept what they had and dramatize it. We see these options revealed in the story.
Aster was cast aside by her birth family and isolated by her adopted mother. She was home schooled,now hides in the theater, and works behind the scenes. One of her duties significantly is to shine a spotlight on the performers. She brings light to their achievements and successes but hides in the darkness because that’s where her mother prefers her. She is taught to be ashamed of her peculiarity. Incidentally, this concept of human oddities and someone with a disability who works behind the scenes is also featured in another novel that I am reviewing, Addie's Eyes by Tim Landry. Once again two or more books engagingly overlap in subject, style, or theme.
It’s significant that this condition is one in which flowers grow on Aster’s face. Partly because it’s not an actual condition so there is almost something otherworldly, practically fairy-like about it. Her appearance resonates old fears of other creatures that are beyond human understanding and can't be identified, counted, quantified, controlled, and dominated by their standards.
The other reason is because flowers are usually objects of beauty, wildflowers particularly so. Something so universally believed to be beautiful becomes a sign of ugliness and isolation when it’s on someone’s face.
Flowers signify many deeper emotions so that some believe that certain flowers correspond to different meanings. Daylilies for example are prominent with both Aster and Antoinette. Aster counts them as one of the flowers on her face and Antoinette is called “The Daylily Darling.”
Daylilies are symbolic of motherhood which Aster has been deprived of by her neglectful birth mother and abusive adopted mother. Antoinette takes a mentor role with her by talking to her and encouraging her to stand out.
The daylilies are also symbols for forgetting worries and anxieties which Antoinette herself practices. Aster is anxious and self-conscious, always wanting to hide. Antoinette not only stands out but she celebrates and dramatizes her difference from other people. She wears clothes that match the flowers on her face. She sings, dances, performs, and banters with the audience. She reasons that people are going to look at her anyway, they might as well pay for the privilege and she can display her talents. Her face may have put them to the door but her talents and personality kept them there.
They also symbolize flirtatiousness. Antoinette flirts with her audience and with Aster. She helps Aster embrace her beauty rather than run from it. She gives her beautiful gowns, and advises her on how to fix her hair or accent her peculiar face. She becomes hands on in teaching her to dance suggesting the relationship might be physical. It certainly is emotional.
When Aster emerges fully dressed in a new green gown following Antoinette’s advice, she has changed from an innocent girl to an experienced woman. Let’s just say that her flowers are in full bloom.With Antoinette, Aster sees the type of woman who she could be. One that can come from out of the darkness and shine a light on herself. Flowers need sun and a chance to grow, so Aster is giving herself that chance. Thanks to the solidarity of a woman who showed her how.
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