Narrative Influences in Bad Girls
--E. Kline

NARRATIVE

I. Modern Story Elements

The psychological element is just one component of the Helen/Nikki story: it would be an unusual story these days without major components which could be characterized as 'psychological'. It's the aspect most familiar to a modern audience, and most frequently analyzed—which is also natural given the story's enormous appeal: what did Helen mean when she said this; what was Nikki thinking, etc.

There are other (mainly modern) ways of characterizing the Helen/Nikki story besides psychological (character-study): as a coming-out story, for example; a romance, etc. Bad Girls directly references other literary sources extensively throughout series 1-3, and a thorough analysis would certainly have to take those references into consideration: intertexutal exchanges about works by Dickens, Shakespeare, and Eliot all require close attention. From the first moments of the first episode, Bad Girls mixed presentational genres; but though some elements of Bad Girls are characteristic of the gothic, for example, the show is not itself gothic.

These components are all pieces of the structure, but not the framework. What specific narrative models does the Helen/Nikki story employ? In considering S3 especially, there are many different levels of disconnect between Nikki and Helen. The key is Helen and her internal journey: to me it seems a large part of the narrative regarding this character is basically psychological (concerned with changes in the character's inner life).

A lot of what goes wrong in S3 is that Helen and Nikki aren't reading each other accurately or well. They think they have an Understanding, but many aspects of that understanding are not actually discussed: when things go sideways they can't depend on their assumptions, the cracks start showing. The unspoken communication that's in part drawn them together is, after all, unspoken; some sort of imagined psychic connection alone doesn't carry people through the rough spots. They have to be able to talk to each other—something neither character is expert in, it's definitely a big area they'll need to work on in their life after Larkhall. As I hope to make clear, however, they're not only misreading each other because of poor communication skills.

The problem with the paradigm of coming out is that it is a model: it implies there are certain basic steps that happen in a certain order (and tends to impose those steps on stories concerned with such subject matter, as evidenced by the last 20 years of gay and lesbian cinema). Although there's some truth to the coming-out paradigm and part of Helen's story can be viewed from that angle, Shed, the writers and production company behind Bad Girls, is careful to avoid embracing it as "the" single, overriding theme for the story they're telling: the story of Helen and Nikki is bigger than that, it's about a great deal more.

(Didi Herman has explored some of the ways Helen's story, especially in its resolution, diverges from a more traditional 'coming-out' paradigm in her excellent 'Bad Girls Changed My Life' (see Bibliography for full information), and I agree with her assertion this is one reason Shed scripted Helen's "I want a woman" declaration as they did: it does not conform to the expected progression, as would some variation on 'I love you Nikki' or 'I want to be with you' or 'I'm a lesbian and I can't live without you'—it's Nikki who's the excessive romantic, Nikki who voices such lines throughout. Any of those declarations (in addition to being horribly cliché) would wrap the story up with a bow, too neatly, and diminish its impact on other levels; all evidence (interviews with Shed etc) indicates they were acutely aware of this issue and wrestled with it til they felt they had what they wanted—which was something rather different).

One of the things the paradigm of coming out obscures is that real life doesn't happen (or necessarily feel) in 'order', it's a messy clutter of overlapping emotions and events—and this story's very smart about that as well, which is one of the reasons the presentation around Helen is so fittingly complex in series 3. Helen's got a major overhaul that needs to take place—about how she thinks of herself, how she sees herself in the world; difficult as it might have been for us, the audience, to view and in some places, interpret, that's basically an internal process. It has to take place alone, mainly off-screen—it's true to her story (and her character) that it does.
 

II. Victorian

...Which is why the Victorian model Shed's writers and producers seem to fall back on in places, especially with the character of Helen Stewart, is so interesting: as used in Bad Girls it's more novelistic than cinematic. It's narrative in essence: it concerns the Inner Life of our principal. (Part of a distinctly modern progression from the kind of novels that came before that era.)^[1] 

When Helen approaches Nikki for assistance with schizophrenic inmate Pam Jolly, for example, she's making a number of assumptions; one is that she and Nikki share the same basic goal of trying to better life for women in the prison (which aim she, of necessity, assumes supersedes any personal friction on account of the unclear status of their relationship; and despite that the two often disagree on how to go about meeting that goal in any given situation). Most of all, Helen is acting here very much like a 19th century Victorian heroine: she's going to her partner as helpmeet, with the aim of doing good works. Having a "duty of care to these women" is something Helen takes very seriously.

In using this Victorian background echo to draw more layers to Helen's story, I think Shed was, basically, trying to bring a secondary novel to screen. An imaginary novel: the fascinating thing to me about this idea is that this is a novel that literally doesn't exist. (Just as the story told in Fingersmith, as narrative subversion of traditional heterosexual tropes, was impossible to imagine until Sarah Waters gave it to us. We can appreciate Fingersmith as we're reading it, but we can only stand back and admire its real scope when we've finished.) So here, too. This is hugely ambitious of Shed, in my view—to try to convey a character working through all of these emotions and nuances behind the scenes, as it were, with this particular set of conventions. The Victorian model is another lens through which we may view series 3, another type of narrative underlying certain plot points that makes it resonate.




So if there is an historic narrative model for Helen's journey especially in series 3, I am suggesting that—in places—it has Victorian undertones. But though Nikki reads a lot of Victorian literature, her behavior and character, unlike Helen's, doesn't fit that model in a directly comparable way: I was so used to pairing the two characters I couldn't reconcile that disparity. I began wondering whether part of what's going on mightn't be that Helen and Nikki are carrying on two concurrent narratives—thus the disconnect—in two very different traditions.

When listening to the language I'd always used internally to describe Nikki and her behavior (in considering her best characteristics), I realized there was something very old-fashioned about it: gallant; courtly; knightly. (Or, honorable^[2], for a less gender-specific identification.) It seemed possible the tradition associated with Nikki's character was quite a bit older: that of the chivalric romance, courtly love. (Nikki does fall rather short on the jealousy front—however, jealousy is, however ironically, a critical if much-debated feature of this tradition: it fits).




Before continuing it's important to note: I don't think it is solely 'Helen's' narrative that has some roots in Victorian tradition, and I hope to make equally clear I don't believe Nikki's narrative tradition should be paired with or ascribed solely to that of courtly love. In short: I think Shed's text swaps these literary influences for each character according to the needs of the story. And not continuously or consistently throughout. These borrowings are part of the story's foundation, not the whole structure: the whole structure is Shed's original story as told through series 1-3 of Bad Girls, specifically, Nikki and Helen's romance, and Helen's journey, both alone and through that relationship. Features of each of these traditions inform the other: aspects of Helen's story are expressed through the courtly love romance, and aspects of Nikki's story borrow from Victorian origins and imagery.

A unified work of art like series 1-3 of Bad Girls isn't set up with a template where writers say, This character must do thus-and-such because that's the tradition they originate in. That's backwards. They borrow little pieces from different places as it fits, often perhaps not entirely consciously, and only as it serves the story. So this isn't some suit of armor I want to saddle the characters with (people were smaller in the middle ages, I don't think the armor would fit our Nikki anyhow); just background that might help in understanding their story or adding shades of meaning.

III. Courtly Love

Barbara Tuchman, from A Distant Mirror:

"The chivalric love affair moved from worship through declaration of passionate devotion, virtuous rejection by the lady, renewed wooing with oaths of eternal fealty, moans of approaching death from unsatisfied desire, heroic deeds of valor which won the lady's heart by prowess, [very rarely] consummation of the secret love, followed by endless adventures and subterfuges to a tragic denouement.... It remained artificial, a literary convention, a fantasy... more for purposes of discussion than for every day practice." [italics mine]

Could a broad summary of this romance's progression be much more perfect?

To address the question of tragedy first, since this angle is the only one which appears not to fit the series 3 ending: most of us, if we're watching for lesbian storylines at all, have suffered through a long, tedious 'tradition' of just this when it comes to lesbian characters in media. Suicide, murder, madness, obsession, addiction, general misery, ad nauseum. We all know the drill—it's been practically obligatory til the last twenty years or so. Tragedy was more than suggested at the end of series 2/beginning of series 3: it was the set-up for all that followed—and more than one viewer could barely see a way round it; as is the nature of tragedy, some disastrous ending to the couple's future felt almost inevitable. Tragedy, in other words (like the Romeo and Juliet motif the show also plays with) is the problem the story sets itself—then goes about solving. This is lesbian revisioning on a very grand scale.

The artifice of the courtly love romance is, of course, echoed in the fact that we're discussing another fictional story, that of Helen Stewart and Nikki Wade, as viewed through this lens. Shed's achievement was to realize a modern-day, lesbian version of this story, and part of its attraction for viewers surely can be found in the emotional credibility of that vision.




To work with this idea more formally it would be important to distinguish the traditions of courtly narrative as practiced in British idiom (rather than French or German, say); see how, where, in what ways they might apply. It would be necessary to take care not to graft or superimpose extra material onto the show: there's no sense trying to force a centuries-old model onto something if it's not appropriate. This is a very broad idea, it's not going to be a perfect fit to the last detail.^[3] 

For example, setting up specific parallels with other, third-party characters feels pushed. I can't see squeezing Thomas in as the Arthur figure, or Fenner as... who, Mordred? Such ideas might appear superficially tempting but in the case of Fenner, arguably his storyline simply doesn't intersect Helen and Nikki's within this particular tradition: his function is much closer to that of a prototypical Victorian villain.^[4] I could be mistaken, but see the excerpt from quoted materials following^[5] for Ross's very interesting idea about the 'custom of the castle'; it makes for an extremely suggestive tie-in to both Nikki's character—and that of Larkhall itself.




So no, Nikki doesn't sit around reading Tristan and Isolde, or Arthur. Given her background, reading medieval poetry or even Malory isn't going to play. This is what I mean by swapping: Nikki, not Helen, reads the Victorians. She also reads Helen, of course—not always accurately, but with close attention and passion—and it's been suggested her appreciation of both amplifies her understanding of each.^[6]

Speaking of Malory: how do we, in a modern time-frame, mainly come by our acquaintance with such stories? No one reads most of them in the original any more: they read or view them as adapted and interpreted... through the Victorians.^[7] To the extent Nikki's narrative intersects the courtly love paradigm, it's through the Victorians: that's the historical locus where her character's story overlaps Helen's. As for Helen, she's not a careerist: she's a crusader. It's another call back to an ideological penchant both women share that stretches across both the medieval and Victorian eras—which is brought up to date with their very modern story and its struggles. They are literally situated in a location which spans all three time-frames: Larkhall, a medieval building that's been modernized to Victorian standards and houses a contemporary prison.

A final thought regarding narrative traditions being exchanged between these characters as suits the story: Nikki's tradition may have echoes in that of the gallant knight-gentil (in this case imprisoned for rescuing her lover from certain peril)... but she's also the princess stuck in the castle—who, in turn, needs rescuing. Which makes Helen, at least part of the time, the knight.^[8] It's yet another level on which the flexibility and exchange of roles, the mutuality of Helen and Nikki's deeds on each other's behalf, makes the story work so well. That these characters achieve such fluidity in their roles—and are both women—is hardly incidental. Gender-swapping around roles doesn't happen easily in any culture where prescribed roles are more rigidly associated with opposite-sex pairings. This story doesn't just work brilliantly because it 'happens' to be about two women: it works to its very core because it's two women.




When I let go the idea that Helen and Nikki somehow 'had' to be contained within the same narrative tradition (nothing about their storylines or characters really suggests that in the first place) just because they shared the same narrative structure—and put it together with their constant frictions around how to effect change, what the right thing to do is in a given situation, the idea that they literally (as does everyone) use different languages to express themselves—it became clear another possibility existed: they weren't using the same language (or, to put it another way, they're speaking the same mother tongue, but with very different accents). As characters, they express themselves through (and originate in) different narrative traditions.