by Erika Yap
It has become a habit of mine to complement my academic study with some sort of associated fiction. Studying International Relations at university has offered me an insight into the inner workings and intra-related dynamics of states alongside the issues they face. However, in terms of understanding culture, this degree programme often runs thin. To some extent, reading associated fiction allows me to fill that gap.
I began reading Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ with a political focus,
oblivious to the profound philosophical questions the prose very rapidly poses to the reader.
This particular endeavour was one inspired by my course on ‘Democratic Backsliding in East
and Central Europe’, and was recommended by a very dear friend.
The work follows the overlapping romantic relationships taking place between Tomas, Tereza,
Sabine and Franz. Kundera devotes passages to the perspectives of the three Czechian (then
Czechoslovakian), and one Swiss, 30-somethings, amidst the backdrop of a collapsing
communist regime.
Kundera’s writing style presents a multitude of opposing concepts throughout the novel,
proceeding to explore them within the interlinked plot-lines of the characters.
One such antithesis involves a conceptual split within the matter of self-love and body
confidence – a strikingly resonant subject for me, a fairly typical 20-year-old. Two distinctive
dispositions are personified in a young Tereza and her mother. These figures symbolise a sort
of conflict between physical bodily liberation and a more intrinsic, divine feeling of bodily love.
Kundera represents bodily liberation using the mother. She talks openly in public about her
sexuality, feels comfortable being seen naked and noisily passes gas without shame.
The rival concept is best described by an excerpt from the novel:
‘It was not vanity that drew her [Tereza] to the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own ‘I’.
She forgot she was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she
saw her soul shining through the features of her face.’
Kundera constructs a tension between these approaches to body confidence using the difficult relationship between Tereza and her mother. A narrative focus on Tereza’s perspective serves to push antagonism onto the mother:
‘Once her mother decided to go naked in the winter when the lights were on. Tereza quickly ran to pull the curtains so that no one could see her from across the street. She heard her mother’s laughter behind her.’
‘Now we can better understand the meaning of Tereza’s secret vice, her long looks and frequent glances in the mirror. It was a battle with her mother.”
At first read, I took immediate issue with the antagonised positioning of these forms of self-love. Acutely aware of my personal struggle with body confidence and the content position I have arrived at, this presentation of physical liberation and self-fascination as opposite ends of a spectrum felt starkly wrong. I assumed these characterisations of Tereza and her mother were simply examples of the male gaze in action: complying to a familiar depiction of woman
personas as set-in-stone, yet flawed personalities. Too sexual or too frigid, too bossy or too
timid, flauntingly liberated or self-obsessed and vain.
Funnily enough, studying feminist theory on a separate but simultaneous uni course, prompted me to mentally relocate the novel in its historical period. This era was one of political change, not only from a state-centric perspective, in terms of the impending fall of the Soviet Union, but also from a social one. The 1970s - 80s saw a societal reaction to the success of the civil rights movement in the USA, a rapid diminishing of imperialism and the most significant resurgence of feminism in the western world since the pre-world war period.
This historical and sociological feminist lens brought on a different interpretation of this mother-daughter polarity; one centred on inter-generational womanhood and the contrasting, but interacting, feminist waves (see work by Diana Coole, 2000).
The mother, representing an older, yet undeniably fundamental, feminism, views body
confidence as a performance of systemic liberation. She symbolises the need to rebalance the sexes, removing women from an idyllic, patriarchally-constructed pedestal that demanded
something ethereal for a woman to be considered adequate. On the other hand, a young Tereza is capable of finding a heavenly quality within herself, totally untouched by external aesthetic ideals and the misogynistic demands of the patriarchy. This is more reflective of third-wave feminist priorities.
The nuanced manner in which Kundera is able to craft and explain Tereza’s love of the self is
something I have not before read. The moment of perceiving one’s appearance as TRULY
one’s own is described as: ‘a time of intoxication’. He elaborates, writing that:
‘…her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a
ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky, and singing in jubilation.’
This exquisitely described euphoria really struck a chord.
I am keenly aware on the effect that post-feminist pop-culture has had on me growing up. The
deceptive presentations of ‘career-woman’ characters, such as Bridget Jones and Carrie
Bradshaw, as feminist icons whilst being defined by their constant search of ‘the one’ to achieve true fulfilment, had me convinced that I needed to comply with that arc (see work by Daniella Verdis, 2009). The root of my issues with self-love and body confidence stemmed from my perceived lack of attention from men! This misconception was reproduced by similarly misguided friends who would assure me that I was in fact desirable to others, and that guys “did fancy me!”. In reflection, we were all victims of this post-feminist period.
In young adulthood, I first began to reclaim my perception of the ‘self’ when intoxicated,
coincidentally coherent with Kundera’s previously discussed metaphor. I remember numerous
instances, usually at parties, where I have peered, drunk yet delightfully astonished at my own
form in the mirrors of strangers. This fascination has very tentatively bled into my sober life,
helped and hindered by various confidence boosters and setbacks.
Tereza’s state of authentic, lovestruck fascination with her physical self is so inspiring because
of its separation from the prevailing societal demands of what the ideal human form should be. I have experienced this level of satisfaction more often, yet still infrequently, as my aspirations have become increasingly detached from a misguided need for male approval.
In the novel, Tereza’s *divine* self-love acts as an inherent downfall, rooted in the shame and
humiliation inflicted by her mother, who deems her as vain and self-obsessed. However, I do not interpret this as a moralistic warning against Tereza’s experience of body confidence. Instead, I view Tereza’s narrative arc as an unfortunate destruction of third-wave feminist values before they had the chance to flourish. A childlike wonder, contentment and, ultimately, love of the self is thus one we should be striving to reacquaint ourselves with. This form of liberation is ultimately superior to the liberation of the mother, as it ventures past patriarchy-dependent definitions of the term.
‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ somewhat failed to enhance my understanding of Central European democracy, much to the dismay of my university work. However, Kundera’s
enlightened prose and intellectually informed characterisation helped make clear to me the
philosophical, sociological, and political mechanisms of bodily liberation, encouraging an honest and fruitful contemplation of my personal relationship with self-love.
Reading List/ Bibliography:
Coole, Diana (2000) ‘Threads and plaits or an unfinished project?: Feminism(s) through the
twentieth century’. Available at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233260147_Threads_and_plaits_or_an_unfinished_project_Feminisms_through_the_twentieth_century.
Kundera, Milan (1984) The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Verdis, Daniella (2018) ‘Representing postfeminist female characters in the contemporary
mediascape: The discursive function of irony’. Available at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322609462_REPRESENTING_POSTFEMINIST_FEM
ALE_CHARACTERS_IN_THE_CONTEMPORARY_MEDIASCAPE_THE_DISCURSIVE_FUNC
TION_OF_IRONY.