Katie Roiphe's morning after

With raves for her book dissecting modernist marriages and a hot new journalism job at NYU, has feminism's enfant terrible finally grown up?

Editor's note: This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Feminism, Rape, Marriage, Rebecca Traister, Life

Photo: (Roiphe) Lucy Bekheet

Photo composite (clockwise) of Rebecca West, Katherine Mansfield, Vanessa Bell and Katie Roiphe.

July 9, 2007 | In her new book "Uncommon Arrangements," about the marriages of seven couples on the London literary circuit in the early 20th century, Katie Roiphe describes pacifist journalist Vera Brittain as a woman who "radiated an ambition that made itself felt as nervous charisma."

It was fitting, then, that as Roiphe sat at a Brooklyn cafe on an early summer afternoon, she picked unconsciously at her nails, chewed on a straw until it was ragged, and radiated a frank likability.

The 38-year-old author first made her name as the baby bête noire of feminism with her 1993 screed against campus date-rape activism, "The Morning After." The book made Roiphe, then a 25-year-old Harvard grad and the daughter of feminist writer Anne Roiphe, a child star of sorts, a symbol of the generational rupture in the women's movement and of a post-Reagan conservative backlash among young people. Her I'm-too-sexy-for-this-movement provocation partially inspired Tad Friend to coin the term "Do-Me Feminism" in 1994.

Since then, Roiphe has earned her Ph.D. in English from Princeton, published "Last Night in Paradise" (a lament about how AIDS education was killing America's hard-ons), a novel about the infatuation of Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) with young Alice Liddell, and some contrarian gender journalism, including an Esquire story about how independent women want men to take care of them, none of which has endeared her to the community of left-leaning women in which she was raised. But recently, Roiphe and her targets have made steps toward a tentative rapprochement. The scholarship-heavy, polemic-light "Uncommon Arrangements," is earning raves, including one from Tina Brown in the New York Times. And this spring, Roiphe was named a professor in NYU's prestigious and historically left-leaning Cultural Reporting and Criticism program. It seems possible that after 14 years, this enfant terrible, or her critics, are growing up.

"Uncommon Arrangements," an examination of other people's marriages, steers clear of the kind of autobiographical detail that littered Roiphe's earlier work, but it is infused with what has long obsessed her: the power dynamics of sex and love.

Roiphe said she began her new book in the period after the 2005 death of her father, psychoanalyst Herman Roiphe, and as her five-year marriage to lawyer Harry Chernoff was disintegrating, a time she lightly called "the worst period of my life so far."

In this time of personal calamity, she turned to biographical material about figures who fascinated her, maintaining what she called "an ardent belief that studying other people's lives can help you with your own." The result of her investigations is a collection of satisfyingly detailed, occasionally lurid portraits of the serpentine sex lives of some of Roiphe's heroines, including writers Rebecca West, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell.

What did Roiphe learn from snuffling so dilligently through the detritus of glam literary couplings? She was struck, she said, by "how many things happen in a relationship when you're not looking." She mentioned a letter from heartbroken political scientist George Gordon Catlin to his wife, Brittain. "It seems like the kind of letter you'd respond to," said Roiphe, "but according to her own mythology, she gets a stomach ailment, puts it in a drawer, and moves on. I see that happening again and again: You turn away for a moment and this distance occurs without you realizing it."

Despite her interest in the common connubial failure to mind the gaps, Roiphe is convinced that we can learn from these couples the perils of over-communication. "Many people believed you should tell your partner if you're attracted to someone or if you cheat," said Roiphe of the period in which Victorian repression was being frog-marched offstage by free-thinking modernism. "This to me is a really crazy idea." She was also taken by the early 20th-century vogue for mastering emotion with reason. "These people were pioneering relationships where they're going to be equal and control their feelings with ideas," she said, "And of course, that's doomed to failure ... Reason always fails and emotion always wins out in all its most banal forms."

In "Uncommon Arrangements," as in her previous work, Roiphe is an apologist for passion. The notion that enlightened thought could scrub clean the grime of our stygian urges is as much a hoot to her as it was when she scoffed at the idea that education about date rape might help students navigate what she called, in "The Morning After," the "libidinous jostle" of modern life.

The appeal of this stance is clear. Who doesn't want to write off ill-advised moments as the result of irresistible ardor? Of course, passion is also one of the world's great cop-outs, a shrugging off of responsibility, whether for not-quite-consensual sex, unprotected congress, extramarital affairs, sleeping with our friends' boyfriends (to which Roiphe has also admitted in print), or a failure to live up to any of the myriad romantic, moral or domestic responsibilities adults are expected to shoulder.

"I'm always writing about that 'wild unsensible emotion' over all the different ways we try to rationalize it," Roiphe said. "That may be why I find myself where I do today" -- here she gave a self-deprecating laugh.

Roiphe has been torn throughout her career between her wish for more old-fashioned social control and her desire for unmoderated social and sexual indulgence. This split is evident in "Uncommon Arrangements," in which Roiphe is clearly beguiled by the naughty dalliances of her subjects, yet expresses prim approval for marriages that fulfill more traditional expectations. She is also entranced by the attraction of strong women to abusive jerks.

"One thing that interested me was how many strong feminist women like Elizabeth von Arnim or Rebecca West were enchanted with this kind of old-fashioned brute," said Roiphe. "They really wanted a man who was domineering and more powerful. These [expectations] are very timeless."

In "Uncommon Arrangements," Roiphe also returns to another of her favorite themes, assuring readers, in a sentence that could have been the subtitle of "The Morning After," that "where a man has been monstrous, the woman has almost always had some hand in creating her particular monster."

"What you're picking up is my resistance to demonizing men," she said. "I have a definite ideological resistance to placing women in the role of victim, especially when you talk about something as intimate and complicated as their personal lives. I do believe that both people are always responsible, and I know from my own experience with marriage that it's very easy and seductive to see yourself as the victim. To me, there is a moral imperative to resist that story."

This is a tune Roiphe has been warbling for 14 years now, and it surely soothes those men who are sick of being told that sex is no longer theirs to take whenever they want it, that they have to share domestic duties, that they have to wear condoms to keep themselves and their partners safe. Don't worry, her books say. Not all of us want so much from you.

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