Lizabeth A. Rand
Hampden-Sydney College
lrand@hsc.edu
The Creative Force of Words: An Analysis of Three Breast Cancer Narratives
In an essay written in 2001 for Harper’s Magazine, the well-known and
widely published writer Barbara Ehrenreich, recently diagnosed with breast
cancer, offers a scathing critique of the therapeutic cultural establishment firmly
entrenched around a disease that strikes thousands of women each year. Aptly
titled “Welcome To Cancerland: A mammogram leads to a cult of pink kitsch,”
the essay argues that “[e]verything in mainstream breast-cancer culture serves,
no doubt inadvertently, to tame and normalize the disease.”1 Ehrenreich first
noticed this normalizing effect on the day of her own mammogram, scheduled
after a routine visit four months earlier had aroused some suspicion from her
doctors. Inside the small changing room, Ehrenreich says “I notice for the first
time now—an assumption about who I am, where I am going, and what I will
need when I get there. Almost all of the eye-level space has been filled with
photocopied bits of cuteness and sentimentality.”2 Ten days later, following a
biopsy, the surgeon confirms that Ehrenreich does, in fact, have breast cancer. It
is at this point in her essay that we as readers recognize the tremendous psychic
shift that occurs after such a diagnosis. A still sedated Ehrenreich hears the
doctor proclaim that “”Unfortunately, there is a cancer.’” 3 She tells us that “It
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takes me all the rest of that drug-addled day to decide that the most heinous
thing about that sentence is not the presence of cancer but the absence of me—for
I, Barbara, do not enter into it even as a location, a geographical reference point.
Where I once was . . . ‘there is a cancer.’”4
Ehrenreich knows that she is supposed to think of cancer as the enemy.
Nevertheless, she cannot help but feel some awe towards it. She recognizes that
these renegade cells inside her own body “are, after all, the fanatics of
Barbaraness.”5 As the doctors and her own family begin to pressure her to make
a decision about treatment, Ehrenreich, with each new scan or test that follows,
senses the “lines blur” between “selfhood and thing-hood,” between “organic
and inorganic, me and it. As my cancer career unfolds, I will . . . become a
composite of the living and the dead—an implant to replace the breast, a wig to
replace the hair. And then what will I mean when I use the word ‘I’?”6 Not only
the personal but the political integrity of self that Ehrenreich felt before cancer is
challenged by the disease. Emphatically, she proclaims “there is nothing very
feminist—in an ideological or activist sense—about the mainstream of breastcancer culture today.”7 Her concluding remarks make it clear to us that she does
not see herself as part of this movement:
No, this is not my sisterhood. For me at least, breast cancer will never be a
source of identity or pride. . . . What it is, along with cancer generally or
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any slow and painful way of dying, is an abomination, and, to the extent
that it’s manmade, also a crime. This is the one great truth that I bring out
of the breast-cancer experience, which did not, I can now report, make me
prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual—only more deeply angry.
What sustained me through the ‘treatments’ is a purifying rage, a resolve,
framed in the sleepless nights of chemotherapy, to see the last polluter,
along with, say, the last smug health insurance operative, strangled with
the last pink ribbon. Cancer or no cancer, I will not live that long of
course. But I know this much right now for sure: I will not go into that
last good night with a teddy bear tucked under my arm.8
The way that Ehrenreich makes sense of her illness illustrates what
physician and clinical professor Eric J. Cassell argues in his 1991 book The Nature
of Suffering—that is, sickness happens not only to a body, but also to a person:
[W]e can see how someone devoid of physical pain, perhaps even devoid
of ‘symptoms,’ can suffer. People can suffer from what they have lost of
themselves in relation to the world of objects, events, and relationships.
Such suffering occurs because our intactness as persons, our coherence
and integrity, come not only from intactness of the body but from the
wholeness of the web of relationships with self and others.9
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Cassell asserts that “[a]ll the aspects of personhood . . . are susceptible to damage
and loss.”10 Ehrenreich is frustrated by the passivity and obsequiousness of the
mainstream breast cancer movement—its pink ribbons and teddy bears that
infantilize women and encourage them, as proud “survivors,” to practically
embrace a disease that is taking the lives of many of them. The anguish that she
feels as she uncovers these truths is a powerful source of suffering. This
suffering is lessened only because Ehrenreich makes a conscious and motivated
decision to engage it—to use it in order to make sense of what has happened to
her.
In this presentation, I discuss the emotion of anger and the way that it is
enacted in three women’s narratives about breast cancer. I discuss the
interruptive and disruptive power of illness and how three women use this
power—claim it, really—to give them strength and give them voice.
Breast cancer, according to historian James S. Olson, is an “old disease. It
transcends race, class, time, and space, a horror known to every culture in every
age.”11 “Among ancients,” Olson says, “breast cancer was cancer.”12 Other
cancers took people’s lives, but often, they were invisible. Breast cancer made
itself known, “wreaking havoc with the breast and the body. Establishing a
causal connection between breast tumors and death was relatively simple.”13
Hippocrates provides us with the earliest description of breast cancer. Cancer,
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he felt, was triggered by an excess of black bile, one of the body’s four humors, or
fluids. “Given the appearance of advanced, untreated breast cancer,” says Olson,
“humoral theory has a superficial logic. As the tumor progresses, it becomes
larger, harder to the touch, and darker in appearance…eventually ulcerating
through the skin, its necrotic tissues generating a fetid odor and dark, brackish
fluids.”14 Sadly, centuries later, doctors knew little more about the origin and
treatment of breast cancer than earlier physicians. Gradually, however, medicine
began to question humoral imbalance theories. Despite that fact, the logic of
breast cancer treatment in the 19th and well into the 20th centuries remained
flawed. For years, women submitted to radical surgeries that were extremely
disfiguring and painful, yet did not cure them. Little was known about the
metastatic characteristics of such a deadly disease.
Betty Rollin’s First, You Cry is a breast cancer narrative written in the
1970s. Rollin was 39 years old and it was 1975 when she was diagnosed. First
Lady Betty Ford had been diagnosed with the same disease in 1974, resulting in
heightened interest from the media and the public at large. Before the mid 1970s,
the words “breast” and “cancer” were seldom spoken at the same time. Rollin,
an NBC news correspondent, had ironically just completed a special feature
report on breast cancer. She, however, somehow felt that the disease would
never touch her personally. Life was going too well for it to be interrupted by
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cancer: “For the most part, I had a golden life, and like most people with golden
lives, I took mine for granted. I was happy and smug.”15 Once diagnosed, Rollin
begins to call people on the phone to tell them that she is going to have surgery.
Rollin’s need to talk, to use words, doesn’t end there, however. Unlike those
patients who want mostly privacy and solitude while undergoing hospitalization
for a serious illness, Rollin craves people’s attention. First, You Cry is a bawdy
illness narrative (consider it was first published in 1976 when it was still unusual
to talk openly about cancer) in which Betty Rollin demands the reader’s attention
to her words just as much as she demands the attention of her bedside visitors.
Rollin uses words to shock people and thereby subverts what our assumptions
might be about her identity as a woman with breast cancer. Words are her
therapy, and their disruptive quality is what allows Rollin to heal.
Similar to Barbara Ehrenreich’s narrative, Betty Rollin’s does not focus on
physical pain as the primary source of her suffering. She does mention it, of
course, and as is the case with Ehrenreich, it is certainly part of her ongoing
struggle. More central to Rollin, though, is the emotional pain she feels, or,
rather, does not feel, after her modified radical mastectomy. Rollin finds that in
order to suppress the emotional pain of losing a breast to a cancer that could
also, in the end, take her life, it is necessary for her to play certain roles, similar to
an actress. She does not realize at the time, of course, that that is what she is
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doing. Rollin convinces herself that she is herself, when in fact her integrity as a
person is threatened. Talking, then, as an actress, for Rollin, becomes “a kind of
drug. The other kinds of drugs kept me from feeling physical pain, and talking
kept me from the other kind of pain. As long as my mouth was moving, I didn’t
have to think. Or feel.”16 The primary role that Rollin takes on is that of the
brave, good girl, cancer patient. Friends and family adore this girl, and the more
Rollin becomes her, the more accolades she receives: “I got many congratulations
for being so brave and cheerful. I liked that, so I got more brave and more
cheerful. And the more brave and cheeful I was, the more everyone seemed to
love me, so I kept it up. I became positively euphoric.” 17 Aside from being
praised by others, Rollin also receives more pity, “quality pity,” as she tells us
rather comically. Each kind of attention fuels the other, until Rollin is entirely
someone else:
Remember that creep, Pollyanna, the Glad Girl? During the week of April
7, 1975, in Beth Israel Hospital on the surgical ward in Room 343, the spirit
of Pollyanna was born anew within the newly mangled frame of Betty
Rollin. Most of the time I was too busy in the hospital even to think about
anything so downbeat as the fact that I was now missing a breast. But
when I did think or talk about it, the Glad Girl kept shining through. 18
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Betty Rollin, I believe, is the “anti”-cancer patient because she constantly
subverts and undermines the classic image that many of us hold in this culture of
the brave, heroic individual, fighting a good fight against her disease. Rollin
thought herself to be genuinely “gutsy and terrific” at the time—yet it becomes
clear to her later, of course, that she is afraid (and justifiably so) to face the reality
of her illness. Rollin’s denial frequently takes the form of bawdiness, also, an inyour-face use of words that un-normalizes the polite, accepting, mild-mannered
image of the breast cancer survivor-patient that Barbara Ehrenreich loathes so
much. Not only does Rollin use words like “shit” and “fuck” in front of her
doctor (who returns the favor), she finds herself replacing the word “breast”
with “tit” in front of practically everyone: “While I was in the hospital I almost
never used the word ‘breast,’ it was tit this and tit that. Rough-tough talk was
not only part of my increasingly agile defense, it was also another good crowdpleaser. Whatta girl, I’d hear them think. Whatta sensa humor. What guts.”19
After leaving the hospital, Rollin experiences many emotions—anger, revulsion
at the thought of her husband wanting to touch her remaining breast—yet she
keeps up the rough-tough good girl act, too, alternating between it and what she
calls in the book “passing.” Resuming an active social life, she and her husband
attend parties at which, she realizes, no one knows that she has breast cancer.
Rollin dresses up, stuffs her bra with stockings, and finds herself making polite
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party conversation like everyone else. Again, however, she questions the
authenticity of this behavior in her book:
[A]s I talked and listened to myself, all at once I thought, My, it’s old me
talking, not even the hospital whatta kid me, but the original me, the one
Before. All because the people who talked to me didn’t know and didn’t
see. Was that all it took? If somebody thinks I’m good old me, does that
make me good old me?20
As a writer, Rollin is enacting for the reader the chaotic range of selves
and emotions that she lived during this time in her life. She, to cite Eric Cassell’s
argument, has suffered because her intactness as a person—a woman, a wife, a
daughter, a reporter, a feminist—has become deeply fragmented. Rather than
hide behind polite discourse about surviving cancer, however, she undercuts
that discourse at every turn. As her story progresses, we see that Rollin is able to
gradually reintegrate these selves into a more coherent psychic whole. Rollin is
forced to begin to see herself as she is. That this process of healing emotional
pain is a delicate one, the reader knows, as Rollin, bandages off, tells us that now
she walks the street “unprotected and unsafe there. I was especially afraid for
the small bump that was my heart. My heart was so close to the surface now.”21
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Similar to Betty Rollin, Audre Lorde, in her 1980 illness narrative and
political manifesto, The Cancer Journals, uses the creative force of words to heal
the psychic wounds that she receives when the harsh personal and political
realities of cancer come crashing down upon her. According to Lorde, it is her
multi-voiced self that helps her survive the early shock and trauma of the
diagnosis: “I felt as if I was always listening to a concert of voices from inside
myself, all with something slightly different to say, all of which were quite
insistent and none of which would let me rest.”22 Lorde’s “voices,” like Rollin’s
various identities, emerge at a time when she is fragile, and the integrity of her
body and of her soul is threatened. These voices, essentially, get her through the
painful days and nights that follow. Lorde opts to have a modified radical
mastectomy because she feels that her best chance to survive is to have the
operation. Unlike Ehrenreich’s and Rollin’s accounts, hers describes the physical
pain and trauma of illness in much greater detail.
Lorde tells us that immediately before the surgery, she “ceased being a
person who is myself and became a thing upon a Guerney cart to be delivered
up.”23 Lorde’s description of herself as a “thing” suggests that perhaps she was
forced to leave her body, leave her selfhood behind, in order to survive what lay
ahead. On the other hand, the fact that she is “delivered up” reveals Lorde’s
ambivalence about medicine’s attitudes towards the body. Lorde implies that
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perhaps she cannot remain whole and survive the treatment that conventional
medicine offers her. Medicine threatens to erase the “I” that defines who Lorde
is. The bodily pain that Lorde feels after the surgery is intense. She recalls
“screaming and cursing with pain in the recovery room.” 24 On the third day, the
pain is almost unbearable, and Lorde makes no polite attempt to hide it from us.
It is “excruciating,” she says. The breast that had been removed “hurt as if it
were being squeezed in a vise.”25 Lorde’s account of breast cancer is as raw and
vulnerable as Rollin’s is bawdy and obscene. Rollin makes us laugh as readers
(albeit out of shock and dismay), while Lorde makes us weep. Lorde is angry
about the physical pain that she feels. She is betrayed by the suffering—and by
those who did not prepare her for it:
Just about the time that I started to feel the true quality of the uphill climb
before me—of adjustment to a new body, a new time span, a possible
early death—the pains hit. The pain grew steadily worse and I grew more
and more furious because nobody had ever talked about the physical
pain. I had thought the emotional and psychological pain would be the
worst, but it was the physical pain that seemed to be doing me in, or so I
wrote at that time.26
12
Lorde suggests the intense pain of mastectomy in her use of the word
“amputation” to describe what has happened to her. Betty Rollin’s term is
“breast-cut-off,” and both are direct, in-your-face ways of expressing the truth of
cancer. Rollin reasons to herself that, “Breast-cut-off says what happens.”27
Lorde, Rollin, and Ehrenreich are not afraid of words; they do not back down
from them. It is this fearlessness that brings them healing of both physical and
emotional pain. Lorde says that “[women] have been socialized to respect fear
more than [their] own needs for language and definition, and while [they] wait
in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will
choke [them].”28
Lorde’s The Cancer Journals is a highly politicized illness narrative,
certainly as much as Ehrenreich’s. Lorde seethes with indignation over the fact
that women are subtly coerced into wearing prosthesis. A Reach for Recovery
woman who comes to visit her in the hospital proclaims that she will not be able
to detect the difference between a real breast and one made of lambswool.
Lorde, only days out of surgery and vulnerable, tentative, already senses that
this is not true. At the conclusion of her book, she tells us that “[p]rosthesis
offers the empty comfort of ‘Nobody will know the difference.’ But it is that very
difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it.” 29
Lorde argues that women are allowed “no psychic time or space”30 to sort out
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their feelings and emotions after surgery. “With quick cosmetic reassurance, we
are told that our feelings are not important, our appearance is all, the sum total of
self.”31 It is interesting to note that Betty Rollin refuses a visit from the Reach to
Recovery group while she is still recovering in the hospital. To her, it seems too
“clubby.” Rollin says that “I have never been clubby, and I wasn’t about to start
by joining a cancer club. I had no wish to see ‘another one.’”32 Rollin does go on
to wear a prothesis, yet once again, every mainstream choice that she makes is
undercut. Rollin is not satisfied with the prosthesis that she can purchase at a
special store. It does not have a nipple; therefore, she “invents” one by sewing a
black cloth cuff link onto the form. Rollin, Lorde, Ehrenreich, intend to do cancer
in their own ways—in their own time—as much as they are able to. They
unsettle us, and, as a culture, we need to remain unsettled about such a deadly
disease.
Notes
1. Barbara Ehrenreich, “Welcome To Cancerland: A mammogram leads to
a cult of pink kitsch,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2001, 49.
2. Ehrenreich, 43.
3. Ehrenreich, 44.
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4. Ehrenreich, 44.
5. Ehrenreich, 44.
6. Ehrenreich, 45
7. Ehrenreich, 47.
8. Ehrenreich, 53.
9. Eric J. Cassell, The Nature of Suffering (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 40.
10. Cassell, 43.
11. James S. Olson, Bathsheba’s Breast (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2002),
9.
12. Olson, 9.
13. Olson, 10.
14. Olson, 12-13.
15. Betty Rollin, First, You Cry (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 24.
16. Rollin, 82.
15
17. Rollin, 68.
18. Rollin, 69-70.
19. Rollin, 73.
20. Rollin, 109.
21. Rollin, 140.
22. Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: aunt lute books,
1980), 31.
23. Lorde, 36.
24. Lorde, 36.
25. Lorde, 38.
26. Lorde, 38.
27. Rollin, 121.
28. Lorde, 23.
29. Lorde, 42.
30. Lorde, 57.
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31. Lorde, 57
32. Rollin, 120.
Bibliography
Cassell, Eric J. The Nature of Suffering. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Welcome To Cancerland: A mammogram leads to a cult of
pink kitsch.” Harper’s Magazine November 2001: 43-53.
Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: aunt lute books, 1980.
Olson, James S. Bathsheba’s Breast. Baltimore, John Hopkins UP, 2002.
Rollin, Betty. First, You Cry. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
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