Riff: The Fear That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Illustration by Tom Gauld

Jasmine-née-Jeanette, the wilting flower at the center of Woody Allen's Age-of-Madoff fable, "Blue Jasmine," is in extremis. Her husband's income once supported her, opulently. But now the money is gone, and so is the husband. Jasmine never finished college, and she has no practical ambitions or employable skills. The simplest principles of computer use confound her. She has lost her friends and alienated her family; her working-class sister, who has temporarily housed her, wants her gone. Jasmine is also losing her mind, the disintegration hastened by drink and pills. And in a bravura performance — all smudged eyes, pale sheen of flop sweat and nervous hand gestures of self-delusion — Cate Blanchett makes Jasmine a riveting spectacle of disintegration, last seen nattering to herself on a park bench. She's so bedraggled that the stranger on the bench next to her, smelling crazy in the air, picks up and leaves.

At the end of "A Streetcar Named Desire" — on which "Blue Jasmine" is openly based — Blanche DuBois is carted off to an institution. But at the end of his updated take, Allen deposits Jasmine in financial and psychic limbo, offering no clue as to what her fate will be. No clue, that is, except to me, and to every woman of my (baby boomer) generation or older who can read the signs in a fibrillating heartbeat: Jasmine will become a bag lady.

She will wander the streets — poor, homeless, alone, unable to earn a wage or survive on her own. She will be shunned as crazy even when she's not. She will become invisible. And she will be forgotten.

This is a future so seriously awful that Allen doesn't dare show it on the screen. I mean, "Blue Jasmine" is tough, by the filmmaker's standards, on its protagonist. But the core audience would run howling from Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, unable even to enjoy a nice cruller or a flute of prosecco afterward, if he showed anything closer to the truth.

Jasmine is my secret nightmare made flesh. I have no heights of luxury to fall from, no jewels to lose. But I do have the nice, self-sufficient little life that I have worked to put together for myself: the funds allocated for rent, for food, for clothes and tickets to Woody Allen movies and a little bit allocated for old age. What if I lost that security and with it my standing in the world? "Blue Jasmine" hit me hard and depressed me silly. There but for the grace of a Chanel jacket go I.

This is true of so many women I know. We can intuit Jasmine's fate because ending up a bag lady is our darkest and clammiest fear. The possibility of falling into bag-ladydom is a terror so deep, so longstanding, so embarrassing to admit yet so matter of fact that we accept it as simply a part of being a woman. I joke with these friends — "I don't want to end up like one of those, ha ha" — and they comprehend the confession behind the nervous laugh immediately. I also know that our shared dread has little to do with rationality and everything to do with what we understand about how we precariously bagless ladies get by in this world.

Some, like Jasmine, may count on the support of a husband or partner and are (or fear being) stranded if and when that support is taken away. Others, all the single ladies like me who have always been on our own, count on our ability to earn and save and earn and save enough to pay our own way in life, now and into our (knock-wood) long-lived, old-lady futures. Even before the real wreckage caused by Bernie Madoff (and echoed in the fictional malfeasance of Jasmine's husband), I have been awakened by the creepy whisper: What if my savings vanished? What if I couldn't drum up work, pay my bills, keep the wheels of my life rolling? Who will care about me?

The power of this vision of future destitution lies in its ability to penetrate the armor of logic and prudent planning and, along the way, to undermine the gains of second-wave feminism too. Before us, women were raised to expect protection from a man — a husband, specifically — in exchange for a traditional trade-off in options: His paycheck, her casseroles. And as a result, older divorced women are particularly susceptible to these terrors, even outstandingly successful and to all appearances financially secure older divorced women. Here's the statistical proof: In March, a 2013 survey on women, money and power, issued by the Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America, made headlines with its findings that nearly half of all American women fear becoming bag ladies — yes, the survey actually used that phrase — including 27 percent with household earnings of more than $200,000 a year. (And the worry is widespread: 56 percent among single women, 54 percent divorced, 47 percent widowed and 43 percent married.)

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