Excerpt: It’s all a bit like going to Thanksgiving at your nicely progressive cousin’s house and finding yourself seated next to Josef Mengele.
For all the women who have been shut up and shut down and denied their brilliance.
What Shall We Do With a Problem Like a Brilliant Woman’s Mind?
There’s a lot that Bones (2005-2017), the comedy-drama centred around a forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel), gets wrong. Academic life looks like scenes from beautifully illustrated Medieval manuscripts of masters and pupils learning in grand cathedrals (actual universities are generally dingier and less well-funded). A central premise is one that’s long been discounted in actual scientific circles: that race can be located on the body and skeleton. Today, race is understood as a cultural construct, not as something rooted in biology. Yet Brennan, completely out of step with the times, uses outdated terminology to declare that a victim is “Negroid” or “Caucasoid” or “Mongoloid” based on matters like the width of the nose. Tellingly, and in keeping with its implicit racial hierarchies, the show would use “Caucasian” in later episodes, thus firmly rooting whiteness in a wider cultural context that the other races are not granted. In one episode, Brennan wrestles her Black male intern to the ground to show him how a victim might have been overpowered and the shot, played for laughs, has her standing above him, hoisting him upwards in a pose that’s horrifically reminiscent of a long history of brutality towards slaves. It’s all a bit like going to Thanksgiving at your nicely progressive cousin’s house and finding yourself seated next to Josef Mengele.
Still, the show, modeled on crime dramas like CSI, Criminal Minds, and Law and Order was, to its credit, centred around a woman who was simultaneously fiercely intellectual and fully sexual and surprisingly modern (most of American cultural representation, including the aforementioned shows, suffers from outmoded sexual proscriptions for women). Brennan was uncompromising in her dedication to her work and supremely confident of both her scientific abilities and her attractiveness (she described herself as “exquisite”) and often dropped details about her voracious sex life.
Bones did well in the ratings for a while but as those slipped, the show de-emphasised Brennan’s intellect and sexuality and slowly began to domesticate her. In the context of her life as an academic, a scientist, and a researcher, this meant that she had to literally and metaphorically lose her mind, to jettison the very core of her being that defined her, to forego her considerable brilliance in favour of a lacklustre husband, an increasing brood of children, and large piles of laundry. This loss of her mind was emphasised in two pivotal episodes, episode 9 of season 6, “The Doctor in the Photo” and the very last episode of the show in season 12, “The End in the End.” Only after she was completely denuded of her mental abilities and normalised as a conventional woman was she allowed to regain anything resembling personhood.
What accounted for the change? How and why did a show that began with an unusually strong female lead go about erasing the very characteristics that defined both her and the series? For answers, we can look to the economic climate of the times.
When Bones first began in September 2005, the United States was, relative to today, more prosperous (or at least seemed to be) but by season 4, in September 2008, the country was in the grip of the financial crisis from which we have yet to fully recover (references to it were peppered throughout subsequent episodes). Because this country has never developed a society where women are truly equal in every sense (and has failed to build systems of equality for anyone else, really), economic crises in this country are always occasions for women’s rights and opportunities relations to slide backwards and for the larger cultural discourse about such to become even more conservative. When Bones began, Brennan was a wealthy, single woman—she was a best-selling author as well as a famed scientist (the series is based on the crime fiction penned by real-life forensic anthropologist writer Kathy Reichs). In one episode, her publishers buy her a car for selling so many books (the show’s perception of how the publishing world works was as unrealistic as its view of academia) and she reminds Booth that she makes more money than he does. The financial crisis and its attendant spike in conservative attitudes towards gender (everywhere, men were bemoaning their fall in income as “breadwinners” and there was little backlash against such sexist rubbish) meant that a mere woman could no longer be sexually and financially free and Bones set about the task of domesticating Temperance Brennan.
To rescue itself in the ratings, Bones posed two central questions: how can a woman remain in possession of her mind and still be a woman? What shall we do with a problem like a brilliant woman’s mind?
The stark answer to the first question was: she simply can’t. As to the second: the only way to respond to the presence of a brilliant woman’s mind was to remove it. Bones dealt with the thorny issue of a woman’s terrifying brilliance by effectively lobotomising her.
“I’m Not Going to Have Any Children”
Bones became instantly and initially popular for its unusual protagonist but also because it consistently delivered the most grotesque corpses on television. In “The Boneless Bride in the River,” a woman’s body is found naked and with every bone removed, deflated into a large human-shaped balloon. In another, a raccoon delightedly rolls a maggot-infested head towards a nearly-copulating couple in a barn. It’s Brennan’s job, as a consultant at the Jeffersonian (the name evokes, yes, the august Smithsonian) to find out how corpses ended up the way they did, and she works with FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz, of brooding Angel fame) and a team of interns and fellow experts. It’s Booth—eventually her husband—who gives Brennan the moniker “Bones” (he also refers to her crew of scientific experts as “Squints”). Bones was never well written: its villains are laughably simplistic and one-dimensional, and most of the crimes made no sense. In “The New Tricks in the Old Dogs” (episode 3 of season 12), a resident of a retirement home is found dissolved in acid in a remote location, and we’re never told how his murderer, also elderly and frail, could have carried out the job. Team members engage in explicit sexual banter and relations in clear view of each other while at work: today, in real life, the place would have been shut down under the weight of multiple sexual harassment lawsuits (we can hope). But its saving grace was, at least for the first four seasons, Temperance Brennan.
Brennan makes it clear from the start that she has no interest in following a conventional path for women. In an early episode, she’s interviewed on television and asked what she’d tell her children about her work. Her response, “I’m not going to have any children,” shocks the host. She’s also unequivocal about marriage, insisting she doesn’t need a “piece of paper” to signal her commitment.
All of that would change around season 4, and by the end of the show’s run in 2017, Brennan’s sexual politics didn’t just shift, they disappeared entirely to the extent that she became a completely different woman. The brilliant, idiosyncratic and highly sexual woman became a docile wife and mother compelled to realise that her life as such mattered more than her life of the mind. To cement this change, Brennan was hitched to Booth, a man whose intellect and curiosity about life never matched her own. The show played up the differences between the two—nearly every episode after their marriage has them arguing about matters as basic as explaining the tooth fairy to their daughter (a move Brennan adamantly opposes as one that fosters superstition, but which she eventually comes to/has to accept). In film and television the idea that “opposites attract” has long been used to create a sexual and narrative tension that is supposed to keep audiences engaged, but it’s not one that works in real life where people completely at odds with each other and ill-suited in intellect and temperament end up in divorce court (as they should). In Bones, as with this trope, it’s a way to implicitly beat women like Brennan into submission: it’s not so much that “opposites attract” but that the woman’s life and mind has to be proven to be inadequate.
To prove the inadequacy of single life, Brennan, puzzlingly and against the grain of her character as originally written, begins to explicitly mock and deride the unmarried. At her wedding, she informs her team of dedicated interns, some of whom are close to her, that she had originally not planned to invite them because the event could only remind them of their sad, lonely, single lives. By the end of the show, she has become a mother to three, is frequently swamped by diapers and menu planning, and every episode emphasises her status as a mother and wife.
It wasn’t just Brennan but the women who worked alongside her, all highly qualified in their own fields, who were increasingly stripped of their independence and sexuality and domesticated and wrapped into marriage and motherhood. Even their most striking physical features and their fashion styles were smoothed down, made more conventional and feminised. For instance, both Brennan and Camille Saroyan, her boss at the Jeffersonian, jettison their grownup hairstyles for childish bangs: pouffy and large and designed to make them look like human dolls. In representation, such hairstyles—not edgy fringes but the sort that belong on children—are the quickest way to infantilise women, to literally erase any evidence that they might have skulls that encase brains.
When she makes her first appearance in season 2, Saroyan looks and walks like a fashion editor with the keen intellect of a leading scientist and a bob and a tongue sharper than Anna Wintour’s. By the penultimate episode of the series, Saroyan is married off to a former intern (following the show’s tradition of not matching women with their equals) into a wedding dress as pouffy as her bangs and sent off to mother three foster children, despite her misgivings about taking care of more children after having already raised a college-age daughter. Every woman is Bones is eventually married off and made a mother: it’s not that marriage or motherhood are inherently bad for women but that the show, like much of culture around it, deployed both as disciplinary tools.
“No One to Miss Her”
“The Doctor in the Photo” is the episode where Brennan is first shown the error of her ways and made to feel inadequate for having devoted so much time to her work. Here, she’s tamed, ripped apart, and forced to turn her back on her own carefully wrought career in science.
The case begins with the unidentified corpse of a woman found entwined with the roots of a tree, an unexpectedly weird discovery entirely in keeping with the show’s aesthetic. As she sets about her usual work on the remains, Brennan finds that the woman died wearing a replica of her dolphin ring (a beloved reminder of her own dead mother). The body is identified as Lauren Eames, a surgeon, and Brennan is shocked that even though she disappeared several months ago, the search for her has gone cold. “How can that be?” she asks Booth and his girlfriend at the time Hannah Burley (Katheryn Winnick). “She was a surgeon.” Burley responds with a shrug, “Single, no kids. Outside of work, there was no one to miss her.” Later, a co-worker who brings over Eames’s effects for examination tells Booth and Brennan that the doctor was “the best cardiac surgeon on the eastern seaboard.”
Brennan, struck by the many similarities between her and Eames, begins to completely identify with the victim, even seeing her own face in the woman’s photo. As the investigation continues, everyone who knew Eames declares her a cold, detached person who only cared about her work with no connective links to anyone and no passion in her life. Where the mystery of every other episode is a familiar quest to find the murderer, “The Doctor in the Photo” is only bent on establishing that Eames’s life, with no evidence of husband or children or loved ones, was entirely worthless. The show deems that her death is not a mystery at all, a fitting end to an invisible life.
Her death, it turns out, was “murder by suicide” —accidentally struck by a car, after a series of events that indicated, to Brennan and others, that she saw no point in continuing with life. In a car ride home with Booth, she breaks down, painfully and in tears, letting him know she regrets not having let him into her life as a romantic partner, a move he firmly shuts down, saying, “Hannah’s not a consolation prize.”
In “The Doctor in the Photo,” Bones declares that a woman who takes satisfaction in her work is literally no woman at all: where a man might gain prominence in the world through his achievements, Eames is made to disappear under the weight of hers. Where a man is validated by his accomplishments, Eames feels that hers question the value of her life. As she discovers more about Eames, Brennan is also made to disappear. The stoic, calm, rational and brilliant woman vanishes into a weeping mess, begging a man to take her back. Not one person praises Eames for being a brilliant surgeon even if they describe her as such, and everyone feels compelled to note the absence of elements like marriage and children rather than the presence of all the many qualifications and work it must have taken for her to become “the best cardiac surgeon on the eastern seaboard.”
Brennan decides that Eames felt such a void in a supposedly empty life filled only with her work that she got into heroin “for the danger of it, to feel something.” As if there was no excitement at all to be found in the work of becoming, let us repeat, “the best cardiac surgeon on the eastern seaboard.”
In the cultural discourse on work and careers, men are seen as being invigorated and enlivened by their work, especially in rarified fields of scientific inquiry, because they’re seen as making a difference. More importantly, they’re allowed to enjoy their work for its own sake. Women who even manage to reach those echelons are consistently made to feel inadequate if they haven’t also had husbands and children. No one in the episode seems to think that, actually, Eames did have a great passion and love of her life, her work itself. Brennan forgets that she finds joy in working late hours, putting both bones and deductions together through the force of her intellect and several years of rigorous training. The attachment to work, for women, is considered an unhealthy one, one that needs to be severed completely if a woman is to stay a woman.
“Who Am I?”
It’s rare for the word “brilliant” to be used in describing women, as if the wide scope of that word is simply too much to describe their meagre brains in comparison to the magnificence and breadth of male intellects. At best, a woman can hope to be considered “smart,” and the word often feels like a condescending pat on the head. We might, of course, ask: What, after all, is brilliance? What does it mean to be brilliant? Bones demonstrated the sort of brilliance we understand well, in the scientific realm. But brilliance isn’t confined only to the work and professions we’re accustomed to associating with “the life of the mind.” There’s a particular kind of brilliance involved in knowing how to drive a bus safely through a crowded Chicago avenue during rush hour (you try it!), and there’s a particular kind of brilliance involved in knowing how to organise a political action so that it actually yields results long after the cameras are gone. There’s brilliance involved in the many tasks considered too menial to be worthy of consideration, and there’s brilliance involved in professions like teaching and nursing which have been routinely feminised.
Temperance Brennan’s ability to look at a set of bones and indentations on them and surmise what may have happened to the person was a point of brilliance, but it didn’t just emerge from nowhere. Her studies and research in various parts of the world, including war-torn countries where she waded through mass graves, meant that she had accumulated a formidable reservoir of knowledge. But brilliance requires more than knowledge (although it’s a fundamental and necessary factor). It’s Brennan’s ability to use that knowledge and to see connections where others might miss them altogether that sets her apart from those who can only see marks and not know how to connect them to a context to make deductions. The appeal of Bones to viewers intrigued by the idea of a woman possessed of such a fine mind is that she never apologised for her brilliance (if anything, she persisted in pointing it out). But for the show to succeed in a climate where such female brilliance was clearly seen as a problem, Brennan had to be reeled back in from a sphere deemed too abstract for a mere woman. It was inconceivable, by the logic of the show, that she should be so passionate about work. That passion needed to be shattered, reconstituted, and redirected towards her real purpose in life: to be a wife and mother. To make this clear, the show ended with Brennan literally losing her mind.
For a brief and shining moment in the last season, it seemed that Brennan would be allowed to reclaim and inhabit her intellectual life. In episode 10 of the last season, she reminds her intern Wendell Bray that if he has lost his once all-consuming passion for his work, he should find another profession unless he wants to spend years doing something he doesn’t care about. Describing her own devotion to work she says, “I couldn’t breathe if I didn’t do this anymore.”
But Bones quickly pivoted away from this view of Brennan, and the two-part series finale literally wiped her mind clean. Due to a series of events too complicated (and, frankly, too silly and incoherent) to get into here, the Jeffersonian is struck by a bomb in the penultimate episode 11. The result is the inevitable chaos, and episode 12 begins with the relief of all as Brennan is found alive and breathing under the rubble (by Booth, of course). But while Brennan is physically fine, it turns out that the shock of the blast resulted in a form of brain damage: while she has the basic knowledge to recognise bones, she no longer has the intuitive brilliance with which she could use them to make startling and accurate insights. In short, Bones has lost her mind and her brilliance. She is simply now an ordinary woman with some knowledge and not much else.
To make her downfall even clearer, Booth comes in to provide her comfort, and their conversation further erases her considerable accomplishments as a scientist and researcher. As she puts it to him, “So much of my life, my intelligence is all I’ve had. I may not have had a family, but I understood things that nobody else could. My brain, the way I think, is who I am. Who I was… I mean, if the thing that made me me is gone, who am I?” Booth consoles her by saying, “You’re the woman I love. You’re the one who kissed me outside of a pool house when it was pouring rain, took me to shoot tommy guns on Valentine’s Day. That’s who you are. You’re the one who proposed to me with a stick of beef jerky in her hand even though you’re a vegetarian. You’re the Roxie to my Tony. You’re the Wanda to my Buck. Who else is gonna sing ‘Hot Blooded’ with me? And besides, we are way better than Mulder and Scully. This is you, Temperance Brennan.”
In other words, Brennan was to be reassured that nothing else mattered as much as her family and husband: that her brilliance was simply beside the point. This moment was met with approval in all critical quarters. Entertainment Weekly’s Kelly Connolly declared that she wept as we watched the scene and Vulture’s Sean Axmaker wrote approvingly that it proved that Brennan was now, in essence, fully human:
This openness is a measure of how far Brennan has come in dealing with the tricky, unquantifiable realm of emotional distress, but perhaps more tellingly, it suggests that she has embraced the idea that she is more than simply her intellect and reason and professional ability. She has a full life. She cares about so much more now, and so many people care deeply about her.
As with the Eames episode, Brennan’s entire life of superb accomplishments up to that point is considered meaningless because, apparently, she has never had “a full life.” That “so many people care deeply about her” stands in contrast to the fate of Eames, whom no one could be bothered to remember or hunt for despite her literally disappearing from the face of the earth, deep into the roots of a tree.
A Woman’s Life of the Mind Is No Life at All
When I was in grad school, my favourite time to work was in the late evenings and nights. I would leave my home and walk into Heavilon Hall where the Purdue English Department was housed, and enter the office space I shared with a couple of other students. By then, the building was mostly empty but there were lights under the closed doors of some offices, mostly those of faculty, along with a few other students, everyone getting their research or grades done in the quiet and stillness. We would run into each other at the vending machine (the Graduate 50 Pounds Gain is no joke), chat for a bit, and then return to our work. I have always loved working late at night or early in the morning, when the rest of the world is at rest or just waking up: I relished the opportunity to be by myself but also around others who were similarly pursuing projects and trajectories of thought. I never thought of such times as lonely or sad—if anything, they nourished me.
As the years went on and the job market shifted and changed for the worse, the dominant conversations in academia moved towards what we now call “work-life balance.” Women academics in particular began to question whether a life in academia was really worth sacrificing the possibility of marriage and children, given that a life dedicated to research almost inevitably also means hours away and on one’s own. This was (and arguably still is) a particularly gendered conversation, and there was, at the time, not much discussion about how to make it possible for women to have children by, for instance, guaranteeing childcare or, horrors, changing a culture where men still saw themselves as baby-sitters to their own children and not as co-parents. I recall a conversation with one fellow grad, a man, when we were discussing the work of one of our most published faculty and the long hours he put in to get his research done. I admired that, but my colleague said, “I don’t want a life like that, if I have to spend so much time focusing on my work.” And all I could think (and didn’t dare say out loud) was, That’s exactly what I want.
If the 2008 crisis caused a pushback against women and put their careers at risk, the pandemic today is making things even worse as women pay the unequal costs of having to take on mothering and work in the home. Everywhere, women’s promising careers are being hampered or even derailed as they find themselves slipping down the career ladder. The pandemic brings several dangers, especially to our collective health, but if what happened post 2008 is any indication, one of the stark costs we will bear will be a backlash, not just among conservatives, against women who struggle to be seen as equals to men in every way. In the midst of such a great and unprecedented crisis, we can take for granted that women’s minds will be devalued even more.
Bones seemed almost revolutionary at first: here, finally, was a show whose protagonist was unashamedly both sexual and intellectual, who made a point of declaring that she was the best in her profession and had no problem declaring her love for her work. But as the show went on and as the cultural climate shifted towards a more conservative view of women’s place in the world, Brennan’s fierce independence of mind and spirit were slowly stripped away from her. She was first placed in a domesticating relationship with a man who was always at odds with her and then, quite literally, had her mind taken away from her. At the end of the last episode of the show, Brennan does recover from the injury and regain her abilities but only after she has understood that she can’t be both a woman and a scientist equally: she has to forego the idea that her work should matter most.
The message of Bones was one that women everywhere continue to hear: even if we aren’t made to lose our minds, we can never fully lay claim to them.
***
For more on how women’s intellects are underestimated and disregarded, see my “On Mary Wollstonecraft and Public/Pubic Art.”
See also my “The Chair Is Everything You Expect, And That’s the Problem.“
Many thanks to Liz Baudler and Hena Mehta for their feedback. Any errors or problems are mine alone.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Images:
Léopoldine au livre d’heures (1835), Auguste de Chatillon
Reading, Ada Thilén (Finland, 1852-1933)
Portrait of Fernande Olivier, Pablo Picasso, 1909
Woman with Yellow Hat (Jacqueline), Pablo Picasso, 1961
Blue Girl Reading, Auguste Macke, 1912