“Does Marge have friends?” tweeted Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the creator of Netflix’s Bojack Horseman, in July, 2016. “Who are Marge’s friends? Is Helen Lovejoy a friend? Sarah Wiggum? Agnes Skinner? To whom does Marge spill her secrets over coffee on cold days? Who laughs at Marge’s jokes? Who knows Marge, truly and well?”
Nearly two years later, Bob-Waksberg’s question stays with me because the answer is, of course, no: Marge Simpson does not have any friends. Marge Simpson does not have any hobbies. Marge Simpson’s existence is largely confined within the lurid pink walls of the house at 742 Evergreen Terrace, where she looks after the baby and cooks and cleans and waits for her husband and her children to come home.
Because it was conceived as a farcical interpretation of the sitcom genre, The Simpsons features the stock characters that are familiar to viewers of American television: the bumbling husband who works, the dutiful housewife who stays home, the rebellious son, the precocious daughter, the baby, the dog, the cat. Unlike certain contemporary animated programs such as Bojack, the show employs a floating timeline in which the characters do not age or experience any major changes in the basic structure of their lives. The characters on The Simpsons wear the same clothes day in, and day out, occasionally slipping into their “formal” uniforms for certain events such as church. Most days, Marge wears a green strapless dress, low heels, a string of red beads around her neck, hair teased into an enormous blue bouffant. It is Marge’s hair—its texture, not its color nor its considerable height—that prompted my childhood association with the character and my own mother, whose hair is similarly curly though perhaps not quite as voluminous.
I saw my mom in Marge simply because they shared the same status within the nuclear family. But, I realize now, with a sort of sad reluctance, that Marge is nothing like my mother. They both stay home—but my mother works. They both cook dinner every night—but my father always does the dishes afterward, while Homer never lifts a finger. They both have a kindhearted and maternal air about them—but my mother is not a pushover; my mother would never put up with even a fraction of the shit that Marge endures from the people in her life.
Also, my mother has friends.
***
The Simpsons premiered as its own television program in 1989, though the principal characters had been featured in shorts on The Tracy Ullman Show for three years before that. The United States, seemingly on the brink of revolution in the two decades prior, had reverted into a great expanse of conservative decadence. It was an era my mother refers to as the “piggy Eighties”: a neon-lit, cocaine-addled fever dream. My mother was an unmarried photographer in her thirties living in Boston. She wove in and out of an art world that had maintained a strong spirit of cultural upheaval despite the country’s political repression. It was a time of great change and great resistance to change, and The Simpsons rose from the conflict as a parody of the prototypical American family, at once absurdly unfamiliar and instantly recognizable.
Despite conservative pushback in the political and economic spheres, the 1980s and ‘90s saw a rise in the representation of the working wife/mom in American films, from 9 to 5 (1980), to Baby Boom (1987), to Working Girl (1988). Dressed in a stiff power-suit that reflected her own personal rigidity, this working woman tried to “have it all” in a capitalistic, trickle-down version of the 1970s ideal of female empowerment. With her patient demeanor and constant smile, Marge’s role within the nuclear family is reminiscent of “a simpler time” when women kept house and always had dinner ready when their husband got home from work. Her dullness is informed by the conservative anxieties that surrounded the less traditional type of femininity seen on-screen in the years leading up to The Simpsons’ premiere. If Homer can be counted on to deliver a goofy punchline or a physically comedic gag, Marge functions as the “straight man” within the show, setting up jokes without ever delivering them, the way mothers are expected to function as the organizer and mediator of the household without any personal life outside her familial obligations.
The closest thing Marge has to consistent “friends” on the show are her older sisters, twins Patty and Selma. As a child, I was terrified of these characters, perhaps because I recognized them as the tragedies they are meant to be: bitter, overweight, middle-aged spinsters who chain-smoke cigarettes, whose only joys in life are watching MacGyver and railing on their brother-in-law (or railing on Marge for marrying him in the first place). They are women who seem to enjoy being crude simply because it bothers everyone around them, their expressions resting in permanent half-lidded smirks.
Marge loves her sisters because they are her family, but she does not relate to them. While Marge is married with children and supposedly happy with her life, Patty and Selma are both perpetually unlucky in love. Selma is desperate while Patty seems to be resigned to her unloveable fate. And yet, both of them are unshakeable in their confidence. When they can’t get their electric razor to work while on vacation, Patty and Selma go without shaving. Even though the entire Simpson family shouts in horror when presented with a photograph of Patty in all her hairy-legged glory, Patty seems unbothered by their response. This confidence is seen as yet another element of their unpleasantness, a misplaced sense of entitlement: how dare they be so shameless in their ugliness? It wasn’t something I could put into words, but I recognized it even as a child, a languageless understanding that these women were not ones I was supposed to emulate. They serve as foils to Marge’s identity as a housewife and a mother, to further underscore Marge’s goodness. Despite having no career or personal life of her own, Marge is understood to have been successful in her adherence to femininity. Patty and Selma, who have consistent if unfulfilling positions at the Springfield DMV, have both failed, miserably, again and again. It’s embarrassing that they even try.
The Marge-centric episodes of The Simpsons all tend to follow the same narrative arc: Marge, feeling unusually brave or perhaps frustrated with her life, disrupts her daily routine and pursues some kind of outside activity. Whether that be a short-lived career, a new hobby, or just a day to herself, the family inevitably falls apart in her absence. Their cartoon world can never shift so significantly as to allow Marge a different career or set of hobbies. The episode always reaches the same conclusion: the family realizes how much of their stability they owe to Marge, and they express their gratitude for her, relieved when she relinquishes whatever activity it was that drew her away from them in the first place. Marge ends up back in the same spot where she began, idly considering the corn-patterned curtains as she washes the dishes.
***
In the fifth season, Marge stops just short of making a real friend in “Marge on the Lam,” an episode that both parodies and pays homage to Ridley Scott’s 1991 road movie Thelma & Louise. The film became famous for its depiction of the two female protagonists as sharp-shooting, shit-talking, badass women who ultimately evade the police by driving themselves off of a cliff after an epic car chase. In the Simpsons version of the film, Marge becomes acquainted with her neighbor, single mom Ruth Powers, after Homer fails to follow through on his promise to go with Marge to the ballet. The two women are fast friends and they agree to go out again the following night, to Homer’s protests: “Marge, that’s twice! I think you’re spending entirely too much time with this woman.”
“Homer, please,” Marge replies. If she is truly irritated, her tone does not betray her; instead, she sounds defeated, resigned as ever to her husband’s bizarre behavior. “You know it’s hard for me to make friends.”
Ruth picks Marge up in a shiny silver convertible with the top down, wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket, smoking a cigarette—a look in sharp contrast to the fluffy pink sweater tied over Marge’s shoulders. Marge and Ruth go out to a series of clubs. Ruth shows Marge the shotgun that she keeps in her purse; they practice shooting at antique cans. Then Marge suggests that they go to the Hollywood-esque “Springfield” sign that overlooks the city, a place she says she used to go with Homer when they were first dating. She and Ruth sit together beneath the giant white letters and gaze out at the houses below. It is a rare moment of quiet contemplation on the show, the darkness of the night rendered in deep blue and purple hues.
Meanwhile, Homer has been drowning his sorrows at the local bar, where he meets Chief Wiggum, who offers him a ride home. On the drive back to the Simpson house, the police chief notices a shiny silver convertible down the road with an overly large tail light. He chases after it, sirens wailing, with Homer still in the passenger seat, but Ruth and Marge manage to escape by driving to the outskirts of town. Seemingly safe from the police, Ruth says softly, “Hey, you’re a good friend, Marge.” Marge stares back, squinting in doubt, and utters one of her signature disgruntled murmurs. Back home, Bart and Lisa are watching the police chase on television. Lisa remarks to her brother, grinning: “I always knew that someday Mom would violently rise up and cast off the shackles of our male oppressors!” Bart rolls his eyes and tells her to shut up.
Eventually, Homer shouts an apology at Marge through Wiggum’s megaphone, and the episode concludes with an explanation of each character’s legal charges: Ruth is acquitted of auto theft; and her ex-husband is forced to pay back his child support in full; Marge is charged with a $2,000 fine for “wanton destruction of precious metal cans.” Everything returns to normal, and Ruth and Marge’s reckless night out on the town is scarcely mentioned again, even though Ruth continues to appear infrequently throughout the rest of the series.
Though “Marge on the Lam” is a brilliant episode, it is yet another tale of Marge’s bottomless well of forgiveness for Homer rather than a story about her potential complexity as a character. Despite Lisa’s impassioned cry of support, Marge does not succeed in rising up and casting off her shackles; Lisa’s line and Bart’s response are played for laughs, underscoring the futility of Marge’s attempts at self-liberation. The very next episode in the season features a storyline in which Marge has a brief crisis after she realizes how much of a nag she is, complete with a montage of moments where Marge was particularly boring.
There is very little subtlety in the writing of Marge’s character because she is the designated “straight man” of the family. Marge does not have friends because she embodies an archetype that should not need friends, and should be fulfilled by her role as wife, mother, and homemaker. But perhaps the emotional dissonance that occurs in certain audience members as a result of this characteristic stagnancy is due to the episodes like “Marge on the Lam”: episodes where Marge gets a glimpse of what might have been, a world she could have had.
By the fifth season of a television program, loyal viewers feel as though they know the characters. They care for these characters, even love them, no matter how archetypal they are in their creators’ original conception. Watching a character like Marge, who is perpetually trapped in a lifestyle that hinders her development, is deeply saddening and difficult to reconcile for a person who values the relationship she has with her own mother.
***
For the first forty years of her life, my mother was not a mother at all, never mind mine. Before I clambered into this world via emergency Caesarean section in 1997, my mother was simply herself: photographer, artist, friend, daughter, sister, wife. She lived a fuller life in those forty years than a lot of people do in twice as long, but it isn’t as if she put her life on hold once I was born. She continued to work and go out with my dad and her friends and pursue her interests. It is difficult for me to say whether people whose births were inconvenient for their parents feel bad about it—whether they feel any guilt for simply being born. Maybe they don’t. All I know is that my mother had signed up for a stained glass-making class right before she found out she was pregnant with me, and she had to withdraw from the course because it was potentially dangerous to her unborn child. I was devastated to hear this twenty years after the fact. What if my mother had unearthed some incredible talent for making stained glass, an art form she had long admired but never tried herself? What if I had somehow impeded an artistic breakthrough? I worried about this for days after she mentioned it in passing, though my mother seemed nonplussed by the memory.
What would Marge’s life have been like if she had not gotten pregnant with Bart and married Homer? We’ll never know, of course, because Marge is a fictional character who cannot exist outside of Matt Groening’s imagined universe. The characters on The Simpsons cannot move forward in their lives because that would complicate the formula of the sitcom episode: the status quo must be restored by the time the credits roll. But what if Marge had initially been written not as a wife, or a mother, but as a person? As her own character with a familial role that described her, rather than defined her? How might the show have been different in terms of its treatment of female characters?
In his analysis of the program’s treatment of Lisa, author Kevin Powers asserts that while the male characters suffer frequently, their problems are “superficial,” providing fodder for the punchlines without the implication of any real psychic damage. “The suffering endured by Lisa and Marge,” however, “is structural, [which] means that [this] suffering lies somewhere near the core of what The Simpsons is saying, whether it knows it or not.” Marge should be happy because she has embodied femininity successfully. Though it may have seemed corny to a more critical audience, the show’s writers could have easily maintained that happiness. Instead, they choose to include those brief moments, like in “Marge on the Lam,” when Marge appears capable of making a friend or breaking out of her daily routine. By hinting at this potentiality within her character and then repeatedly subverting it by each episode’s end, the writers reinforce the misogyny inherent in the show’s conception of female identity. Women are defined by their husbands, and women without husbands are marked by a clear sense of failure. To be a woman is to be a wife and a mother, never just a person.
***
In 1986, my mother turned thirty and moved into a loft in the South End of Boston, where she did a good deal of experimental photography. Her work was motivated by her interest in the narrative possibilities in the movement of still images. That December, President Ronald Reagan delivered his Christmastime address to the people of the United States, cautioning the nation against the erosion of family values. In the spring of 1987, The Simpsons’ titular characters first appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show in a short that ends with all five members of the family sleeping together in the same bed. For all of its absurdity and imagination, and despite the fleeting moments of empowerment that Marge, Lisa, and even Patty and Selma occasionally experience, The Simpsons is still a product of its time and of its genre. The nuclear family, the “fundamental unit of American life” that Reagan describes in his address, is an essential facet of the 22-minute sitcom episode. The Simpsons is no different in its understanding of the nuclear family as a system where the wife and mother is the “straight man.” Marge’s place in the family is stagnant because it has to be in order for the family to function, in order for the television program to make sense. The episodes in which Marge experiences a change in routine only to return to her friendless life maintain the American vision of not only what a woman should be, but also what a family should be—one that mimics the fantasy of the good old days in the face of the loss of those family values that the president insisted were so tenuous.
As the ball dropped on the “piggy Eighties” a week after the premiere of The Simpsons, my mother spent her New Year’s Eve in Boston. She roamed through the city’s First Night events before ending up at the Prudential Center with a group of friends, fellow photographers and artists who laughed loudly and spoke with great enthusiasm about their craft and the world at large. It was bitterly cold that evening but the dancefloor was warm with the thrash of dancing bodies and the anticipation of a new decade, a new millennium somewhere beyond that. She tells me that she met an acquaintance and merrily danced the jitterbug with him as her friends looked on, secure in the knowledge that these friends would remain perhaps not forever, but at least past the end of this episode.