Marge Why Pt. 2: Because

wrapping up the deep dive into the Bouvier subconscious

Last week, we talked about all the artforms at which Marge succeeds, and all the business ventures at which Marge desperately, desperately fails. Basically the only venture Marge went on successfully was when she briefly worked as an erotic cake baker. Which is ironic, since Marge can be something of a prude.

CHAPTER 4: Marge Judgy

Something that I think holds Marge back a ton internally is her alleged affinity to American puritanism. She hates violent cartoons, she hates burlesque. She doesn’t know that Gore Vidal is gay.

Marge goes on moral crusades every once and a while, and they go ...weirdly. In “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge,” she successfully defangs everyone’s favorite homicidal cat and mouse duo. Kids start playing stickball again, her children are more polite, and the world is generally better? But then she’s asked to lead a similar campaign against Michaelangelo’s David, and specifically his pebis. Marge finds nothing objectionable about David’s dingus, and is called out for moral hypocrisy. She immediately buckles.

Marge says you can’t be in favor of one form of censorship and against another, which is total bunkum. I don’t have a problem with cartoonish violence, but I also understand someone who doesn’t like the idea of ultraviolence directed at children. And how that same person may have no objections to the tiniest penis in art. We could be here all night unpacking the way the Hays Code lumped together sex and violence as the two naughty things to depict in media, and how that festers with America’s weird relationship to the 2nd Amendment, heteronormativity, and Victorian sexual ambivalence, until you have the gay panic defense. But this newsletter isn’t about that. This is supposed to be about Marge, dammit! 

Marge also fails at getting the local burlesque house shut down. When she discovers its existence, she flips. After her attempt to politely ask Belle to leave town forever doesn’t work, she shames patrons in a town meeting. A sufficient furor is whipped up, and the goody two shoes make to destroy private property. Luckily, Homer and Bart aren't swerfs, so they save the burlesque house with song. Marge shows up late with a bulldozer and accidentally bulldozes the place after she’s lost the political will to do so. That’s the problem with mob rule, so fickle. To pay for repairs, she winds up having to work as a ventriloquist. Which, apparently, is one of the few arts she can’t do well.

Marge also leads the charge against the Movementarians, the cult that takes over Springfield. Marge can’t be yoinked by the cult because her ideology can’t be replicated by it. Even Lisa’s academic ideals are no match for her need for approval from authority. But Marge gets her sense of meaning from the family. That’s the one thing a cult can’t replicate, the way nuclear family centers moms as the household deity.Marge crusades for family values because her family is what gives her life meaning. It’s the same reason comedians like to pretend their little jokes are truth bombs hurled at power or whatever. I need my thing to matter because I need to matter. It’s ironic that Marge goes off against most public displays of horniness, because, well...

CHAPTER 5: Marge Horny

Marge Simpson fucks. Get over it, prudes. My understanding of Marge completely flipped when I realized she might be one of the horniest wives on TV.In “Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy,” it’s Homer’s indifference to sex that puts a strain on their marriage.We know Marge is horny for Homer, because she rawdogged herself into 3 accidental kids.

And back to Marge’s erotic baking side gig, it’s actually the perfect job for her. It makes use of her homemaking skills, it’s creative, and Homer and Marge explore sploshing at the episode’s end. Marge is completely placated about making horny cakes when she’s told their main customers are married couples. But even this successful venture can’t fight sitcom inertia. Or Marge’s general comfort in staying cloistered in the home. 

CONCLUSION: Marge Simpson - Underacheiver, and Proud of It!

The Simpson home is iconic. That place has completely insane color choices--choices that, in-universe, Marge made. Her house is an installation piece, a camp-a-palooza with a disappearing rumpus room, akin to Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return. John Waters appreciates the artistry in Marge’s decor.

Those curtains are objectively perfect. If Disney had any sense, they’d do a capsule collection with Target of all the iconic pieces Marge has brought to the Simpson home: the corn curtain, the starburst clock, the boat painting, the wall-mounted fern, the framed painting of Lincoln from the upstairs hallway.

THE DEVALUATION OF WOMEN’S LABOR AND UNPAID LABOR ENGELS ENGELS ENGELS

Marge’s life seems small because 1) she’s never used oregano and 2) society devalues domestic work and the unpaid labor of women. The show often makes jokes about how much harder Marge’s work is than Homer’s, but it never acts like her work could be meaningful to her. 

Or as Engels put it, after society was rearranged in pursuit of capital,  “...the domestic labour of the woman no longer counted beside the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra […] therein lies the great historical defeat of the female sex.” 

But the Simpsons family --nay, the whole town-- falls apart when she’s gone. When Marge goes on a weekend-long vacation, Maggie escapes the Simpsons house and winds up blocking all traffic in a 2 block radius around Phineas Q Butterfat’s Ice Cream Parlor. And When Marge is arrested for shoplifting, Springfield’s economy is made worse. Marge’s baked goods bring in boffo bucks at the yearly town bake sale, and when the event goes on without her, they wind up having to settle for a lesser presidential statue in their town square. They should have been spending that money fixing main street, but whatever.

MARGE IS A VICARIOUS THRILL JOCKEY

Marge likes to be fun-adjacent. Rather than whack snakes, be Mr. Plow, or join the Naval reserve, she’d prefer to be near Homer while he does those things. And fuck him wearing their respective outfits. Most of the time, when Marge tries to be the center of fun, she’s quickly overwhelmed. Being a cop was too ethically thorny, gambling quickly hijacked her dopamine system, and even buying a doorbell somehow got too intense. 

As someone who’s been in a monogamous relationship since she was 18, yet helped someone else negotiate the terms of their 4-way one time, I get Marge’s vicarious thrill jockey nature. Sometimes you don’t want to be Sonic, sometimes Tails is enough. 

There’s reason to believe Marge likes all Homer’s shenanigans, to a point. Sure, she’ll complain if things are getting too out of control. But in “Lard of the Dance,” when the grease scheme goes tits up, what does she do? Suggest a new scheme.

Even outside of her relationship with Homer, Marge finds meaning in caring for utterly helpless creatures. In the season 17 premiere, “Bonfire of the Manatees,” Marge fucks off to the beach when Homer lets the mafia film a porn in their house. She connects with some guy played by Alec Baldwin who is some sort of manatee whisperer. Marge cares deeply for these fat idiots with all sorts of gunk in their ears. She comes back to Homer when she realizes that, in her words, Homer is “the most endangered species of all. This is essentially the same reconciliation as the one in “Secrets of a Successful Marriage,” only tbh, this one hits better.

PEOPLE ACT LIKE MARGE’S SMALL LIFE IS HOMER’S FAULT BUT IT’S NOT

Marge briefly became besties with Ruth Powers, the divorcee down the road, voiced by Bebe Neuwirth. They go to the ballet, rave with the Mayor, and shoot guns. You know, girl stuff. But because this is a whole episode parody of Thelma and Louise, they have to go on the run when Ruth is almost pulled over in the car she stole from her deadbeat ex. What’s interesting to me about this episode, is that Homer assumes Marge is on a cross-country crime spree because she’s unhappy at home. But her crime spree has nothing to do with Homer.

Marge only took Ruth to the ballet because Homer didn’t go with her. But after that, it’s the power of friendship pulling Marge into the criminal underbelly. It has nothing to do with Homer. This is a problem many allegedly feminist critiques of Homer and Marge’s relationship get wrong: focusing on the man as the only person with agency. Untrue! A lot of the time, the person holding Marge back isn’t Homer, it’s Marge. 

The thing Marge gets from Homer, besides complete and utter dependence, is resilience. Marge is a quitter. She gives up at the drop of a hat. If anything, Homer should quit more. He is very bad at a lot of things. And yet, because of his 1) white male privilege, and 2) positive attitude, he’s done things waaaaaay above his level of competency. He won a Grammy, went to space, became sanitation commissioner, and married Marge. Homer not only gives more praise than Marge ever got in her family, he models an inner sense of self worth that she desperately needs. Plus a ton of banging. 

So that’s Marge. She’s a broken bird, thriving for the first time in her life in a horny nest. Things aren’t perfect. I wonder how far Marge could go if she jerked off sometimes, and thus decoupled sexual gratification from emotional validation. But the whole point of this video is that we don’t get to dictate what kind of life Marge should have. She’s living the life she wants. She just thinks it’s neat.

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