Analysis
Didion is a moralist, but her vision of morality is never sentimental, only clearly and rigidly stark. Play It as It Lays is an existential novel (and essentially a moral tale) about Maria Wyeth’s search for meaning, but in this novel meaning is found only by confronting its absence and, for Maria, by battling with the primordial fathers (the male world), who in this novel are associated with the desert and with spiritual disintegration. When one examines the fragmented episodes and the colored pages that make up Maria’s life through Maria’s eyes, it becomes clear how this hero’s descent into what might be called insanity (like the classical hero’s descent into the underworld) is both Maria’s means to salvation and a somewhat sane response to an insane world.
Throughout this novel, Maria is used and named as a sex object. Maria becomes a model because her parents encourage it and because in a male-dominated society there is a market for attractiveness. Maria is called a “whore” by the woman in Ralph’s Market whom she tries to help, and she is assumed to be a prostitute by the desk clerk in the Sands. In the film called Angel Beach, Maria is cast by her husband, Carter, in the starring role—she gets to “be” a woman raped by twelve bikers.
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’s quest begins when she becomes separated from Carter.) A man in an elevator gives Maria the look “dutifully charged with sexual appreciation, meant not for Maria herself but for Carter Lang’s wife”; Maria is not seen for herself but only as the property of a well-known film director. Even the nurse in the hospital refers to Maria as “Mrs. Lang,” although Maria tells the reader on page 2 of this novel that she herself “never did.”
Although Maria is somewhat defined by the male world because of the roles that have been given her, Didion also gives the reader glimpses of another Maria. After telling Carter of her pregnancy, Maria is frustrated and sorry at not being able to penetrate Carter’s world. Throughout the novel, Maria is associated with water, which is symbolic of life and feelings. She feels guilty because of her mother’s death and the abortion; in several places, Maria cries and tries to hide her tears. She tries to suppress herself in this artificial environment where “failure, illness, fear, they were seen as infectious, contagious blights on glossy plants.”
In her dreams, Maria imagines herself as the mother in a family. She dreams at one point that she has the baby (instead of the abortion) and that she and Kate are living with Ivan Costello. In another dream, she and Les Goodwin and Kate live by the sea. Although Ivan Costello tells her, “there’s not going to be any baby makes three,” and Carter threatens to take Kate if she does not go through with the abortion, Maria’s identity as a female and mother is apparent in these passages.
Maria’s separation from the male world and her identification with the female world seem to be a necessary step in her heroic struggle. Early in the novel, Maria looks in the mirror and sees “Carter’s reflection”; a little later on, Maria deliberately stands before a hand mirror “picking out her mother’s features.”
Maria’s abortion is what leads to her complete breakdown; it is also what saves her. After the abortion, Maria wants...
(This entire section contains 760 words.)
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to see her mother; however, in the absence of such comfort, she is forced to confront herself and her world and to cut away that which does “not apply.” Toward the end of the novel, Maria tells Carter and his group that they are all making her sick (as indeed they are). After BZ’s death, Maria experiences the “nothingness” that is perhaps a prerequisite for all truly modern heroes and begins to affirm and assert that “feminine” and somewhat traditional self that is “Mar-eye-ah.” She tells the reader at the end of the novel that she will “get Kate, live with Kate alone, do some canning.” She says, “After everything I remain Harry and Francine Wyeth’s daughter.” She tells the reader, as that agent of life that all heroes must be, that she knows what “nothing” means and keeps on playing.
