Slouching Toward Bethlehem

from a review in Double X

It pleases me so much to be 42 and have it seem like popular culture is actually interested in what it’s like to slouch toward the Bethlehem of middle age.

Elizabeth Wurtzel would love to see a show exploring sexuality and romance in women approaching middle age, but decides that ABC's Cougar Town falls short. To describe this time of life, Wurtzel borrows from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming."

This poem endures as one of the twentieth century's great expressions of anxiety. In the midst of modern upheavals, a sort of Messiah or Antichrist emerges from the desert. Just what havoc this "rough beast" will visit upon us is left unsaid, but it is almost certainly not the frustrations of turning forty.

Wurtzel is also invoking Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion's 1968 volume of essays. That book is a testament of disaffection in California and more congruent to Wurtzel's declinist attitude. Didion's title essay exposes the Haight-Ashbury as a failed social experiment.

Didion herself somewhat muddles the Yeats reference. The poem reads "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Is Didion suggesting an antichrist borne of lax morals? Her title's absent pronoun further complicates the metaphor: is it herself or us who are "slouching," rather than the "rough beast"?

"Slouching" can only be in one direction: downward. Hence Yeats' dark force must be an extraterrestrial entity that deigns to take human form. But the phrase now seems to carry a connotation of adult female dissatisfaction. Both Wurtzel and Didion have adapted an apocalyptic vision into a shorthand for their own private pathos.