51 pages • 1 hour read
Beautiful Disaster
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Themes
The Power of Physical Attraction
The romance genre relies on the theme of “love conquers all” and has from its beginnings, whether those beginnings are located in the action-adventure prose romances of classical Greece or the love lyrics of medieval troubadours. Pamela by Samuel Richardson, a landmark in the 18th-century development of the novel in English, features a love story and more specifically, the tale of a virtuous maid who is aggressively wooed by her employer and, in refusing to sleep with him, eventually wins an offer of marriage and elevation in social status. The fantasy that a romance with a powerful partner will guarantee a woman protection, security, shelter, and passion for life is a key trope in romantic fiction and perhaps the reason that romance continues to be the best-selling fiction genre, year after year.
The trope of the “good” girl falling for the “bad” boy who is then reformed by his devotion to her has proved its continued appeal since Pamela and defines the central relationship in Beautiful Disaster, though the novel relies less on the notion of reform than on the transcendent power of physical attraction. While their declarations of love to one another prove a turning point in their commitment to a relationship, Abigail Abernathy is primarily drawn to Travis Maddox by sexual attraction, which explains how she overcomes her expressed reservations and their self-described dysfunctional relationship dynamic to achieve a harmonious union at the end.
His physical appeal is the first thing Abby notices about Travis when he enters the fight ring; she’s attracted to his physique, the toughness implied by his tattoos, and his sense of ease. He notices her blood-spattered appearance and remarks that her sweater looks good on her. He’s attracted to her, but he’s also drawn in by her fascination with him and with her lack of fear. In this first interaction, Travis is protective and nurturing; he keeps Abby from being shoved and wipes the blood off her face with his towel. She is left smiling. In their next meeting, in the school cafeteria, Abby notes that Travis “oozed sex” (8), but her response to him is dictated by how she wants to be seen in a romantic relationship. She makes clear she will not join the long line of women who become his sexual conquests and admits, “I didn’t like the way it made me feel when he was so close. I didn’t want to be like the scores of other girls at Eastern that blushed in his presence. I didn’t want him to affect me in that way at all” (9).
In denying that she is sexually attracted and insisting that he court her by becoming friends first, Abby seems to agree with what traditional sexual politics suggest, that delaying sexual gratification will whet Travis’s interest in Abby and set her apart from the women who pursue him. She positions herself for a deeper attachment by accepting the “privileged” position of sleeping in his bed, but also placing strict limits on their physical intimacy. Her resistance seems less motivated by personal modesty than by a desire to be seen as special and singular—the one person who can capture his heart. She’s aware that women who have sex with Travis on the couch are the women he sends home the next morning. By occupying his bed, Abby has intimate access, which she takes advantage of by initiating physical, if platonic touch—another moment when the novel endorses traditional, heteronormative sexual archetypes, painting Abby as simultaneously playing hard to get and a “tease.”
Abby also heightens attraction through delayed gratification by making an issue of it when Travis kisses her neck as they’re dancing. By insisting that she is not sexually available to him, and arousing his spirit of competition by dating Parker Hayes, Abby asserts her value—her “specialness”—as a “prize.” Agreeing to Travis’s bet gives her a reason to stay close to Travis without losing her own dignity and pride, highlighting the novel’s ongoing tension between asserting and submitting to control in a romantic partnership. She knows if she berates him for his drunken conquests and storms out of the apartment, she will lose her privileged position in Travis’s bed and the assurance that she means more to him than just sex. Sticking to the bet, as she terms it, allows Abby continued access to Travis.
When he initiates an embrace in his bedroom, but then stops because he is drunk, Abby is hurt and angry at his withdrawal. Though she has insisted to America Mason that Travis is not a safe relationship bet, the physical attraction motivates her to initiate intimacy the night their bet expires. Worried by the possibility that he might lose interest in her, Abby once again uses distance and the threat of competition (sneaking out of the apartment without saying goodbye, accepting dates from Parker, etc.) to stoke Travis’s feelings for her. Her gamble pays off when Travis declares that his interest is more than sexual and that he loves her. The implication is that neither Travis nor Abby can resist the pull of their sexual attraction that has formed the foundation of their commitment. Abby consents to a sexual relationship, one that is publicly recognized, and becomes the acknowledged singular object of Travis’s affection—she both “wins” and is won.
In the context of intimacy, Abby’s concerns about Travis’s volatile behavior evaporate in the interest of physical connection. Her sexual response to him glosses over his flaws, allowing her to excuse, ignore, or accept behaviors that might otherwise seem abusive or dangerous. In public when his violence and impulsiveness inevitably resurface, Travis uses his professed love and desire for Abby to justify them. As a result, Abby finds herself in a war between the strength and depth of her attraction and the kind of character and behavior she has always believed to be “good.” This internal struggle for Abby provides the backbone of the drama in their relationship. Only by embracing Travis’s point of view and adopting it as her own can Abby resolve the tension and fully commit to their life together. By choosing to own and celebrate their status as a “beautiful disaster”—both “dysfunctional” (295) and passionately in love—Abby fully embraces the romance fiction cornerstone that love truly does conquer all, and that this passion between them must and will trump any disastrous elements of individual character. When Travis carries her away from the Valentine’s Day party at the frat house—which might look to some readers like an abduction—Abby decides to stop “fighting the inevitable” (367). She concludes that, while she can’t explain the attraction, their inability to stay away from each other simply shows they should be together.
Far from reforming Travis in the end, as is the customary pattern, Abby declares her wish that Travis not change. She accepts his jealousy as devotion, regards his possessiveness as proof of love, seems titillated by the violence of which he is capable, and is not bothered by his occasional excessive drinking or fights. Their powerful attraction sweeps all her reservations away and leaves her certain she will have no regrets, clinching the fantasy offered by the romance genre that a sufficiently passionate relationship reduces or lessens the pain of all other obstacles or romantic red flags.
Influence of Family and Background
The characters in Beautiful Disaster demonstrate the formative impact of childhood and family dynamics on adult choices and behavior. Travis’s ability to love and relate to women has, according to his family, been shaped by the early loss of his mother. Abby’s attempt to establish a new identity for herself is an attempt to distance herself from the lifestyle and the reputation that her parents, particularly her father, shaped for her.
Parker shows the more conventional path of the emerging adult making choices for his future under the guidance and model of attentive parents. Parker’s father went to Harvard, so Parker expects to attend Harvard as well. Parker’s mother takes an interest in his dating life, makes an effort to meet Abby, and helps her son move into his own apartment; Abby sees her influence in the décor.
In contrast, Travis’s parental influence seems to be minimal. The atmosphere and décor of the Maddox home suggest to Abby that Jim is stuck in the past and has been unable to move on after the death of his wife. Travis tells Abby early in their friendship that his father has an alcohol addiction and a temper. He speaks of this in a disapproving fashion and doesn’t acknowledge that he, Travis, also frequently behaves this way. Travis tells Abby that he learned to fight by growing up with four brothers. While the Maddox men freely heckle each other, their choice to gather when they are all in town, and for holidays, demonstrates that they maintain family bonds and relationships. There’s no indication that his brothers or father have concerns about Travis’s violent behavior—like the public attacks on other young men outside of the ring. Given his upbringing, Travis believes this aggression is acceptable or at least excusable behavior since it’s what has been modeled for him. His skill in being able to defeat opponents, while avoiding taking a hit himself, is something he takes pride in. The story’s positioning of Travis’s aggressive behavior and the influence of his family, compared to the more destructive influence of Abby’s father, narratively primes Abby to embrace Travis’s behavior as acceptable and even desirable. The novel seems to imply that some types of familial influence are condoned, or else justify subsequent problematic behavior, while others do not.
Jim, Travis’s father, expresses appreciation to Abby that Travis now has a nurturing woman in his life. He believes it is a big step toward emotional maturity that Travis is involved in a relationship with a woman, but he fears how Travis will react if Abby leaves him, too. This attitude suggests Travis grew up in an environment where male emotions were considered fragile, the damage of loss and grief excused outbursts or aggression, and the solution to aggression is the gentle influence of a woman.
Abby’s response to her upbringing is opposition and escape. At Eastern, she feels she can become someone else. She chose not to room with her best friend, America, because she wanted to try being independent. She hopes that a demure mode of dress and dating Parker will guide her toward a future she believes she wants. By turns, Abby is concerned that Travis will behave like her father—valuing money over his family—or that she herself will behave like her father and make choices that ruin other lives. When presented with the option to make different choices, however, Abby falls back on what she knows. She chooses to be with Travis despite her initial protests. When presented with the opportunity to trounce the Maddox men at the poker table, she takes it. She occasionally drinks alcohol to excess, something she says she learned from her father—notably she condemns her own tendency to mirror her father’s behavior but accepts it without judgment from Travis, holding herself to a different standard. These choices speak to the enduring influence of formative childhood experiences and expose the cyclical patterns that often arise from such circumstances even as Abby resolves to find a sexual and romantic passion that turns “disaster” into something beautiful.
While Abby expresses no affection for her mother, telling Travis that her mother has an alcohol addiction and Abby would prefer to spend her holiday break with America and her family, she immediately jumps in to help Mick when he begs her for money. Though she tells Travis she doesn’t want to be known as Mick Abernathy’s daughter but just as herself, Abby easily steps back into the role of running a poker table and confronting mobsters. In some respects, it is as if Abby wants Travis to see and accept this part of her identity. Abby objects to Travis getting involved with Benny on the grounds that she refuses to live that lifestyle, but when she decides she wants to marry Travis, she suggests they go to Vegas and do so immediately rather than pursuing more traditional options. This may mean either that Abby has integrated her two identities—her gambling past and her life at Eastern—or that she has simply decided to reorient her life around Travis, trading one possessive identity (Mick Abernathy’s daughter) for another of her own choosing (Mrs. Maddox).
Despite their lack of traditional family structures or role models, both Travis and Abby demonstrate an early desire for domesticity. Travis wants Abby to sleep in his bed when she is at his apartment, as if they are in a committed relationship. He makes her dinner and gets her a dog. Abby cooks Thanksgiving dinner, stepping into the role of the nurturing Maddox female in advance of becoming the next Mrs. Maddox. The novel opens with Abby asking Travis to slow down, acknowledging that she is only 19 and still a first-year student in college, but concludes with her decision to cement a domestic partnership with him in the form of an elopement. Whether or not Travis turns into Mick—or she herself does—Abby takes the chance to create a new family structure on her own terms.
The Impact of Reputation and Image
Throughout the novel, Abby demonstrates a persistent concern with how she is perceived by other people, suggesting the power of image and the influence of other people’s judgment on one’s life. This may be a function of her age, as she is still in a psychological stage where one is defining one’s identity in contrast to their peer groups, thus making major decisions heavily influenced by them. Despite her attempts to deny that she cares what other people think, Abby is constantly aware of attention directed at her or at her relationship with Travis, and exhibits a wish to control how people perceive her. It creates several points of tension in the novel when Abby displays an interest, not in being a certain way, but being perceived a certain way—another sign that she is in the process of constructing her own identity as an independent adult in the world.
As a function of the first-person point of view in the novel, readers are privy to Abby’s uncensored internal thoughts, positive and negative. Abby is swift to pass judgment on other people based on how they appear, while also rejecting the speculation of others about her. To Abby, Parker looks like a Banana Republic model and is charming, so she decides he is appropriate dating material. Part of Abby’s initial resistance to Travis is because of his reputation; she doesn’t want to be classified as the type of girl who would pursue him. Once they have established that they are just friends, Abby is eager for other people to understand and acknowledge this. Though she is on a college campus with presumably thousands of students, Abby imagines that “everyone” is taking an interest in her sex life. This may in fact be the case, as she is informed when circulating gossip supposes she is sleeping with Parker and Travis at the same time. Abby immediately wishes to correct this perception because it threatens the still nascent identity she is discovering for herself. She’s more concerned with being viewed as sexually promiscuous than with forthrightly communicating her interest or intentions to either man because the latter is much more difficult. She knows she doesn’t want to be seen as promiscuous or a “groupie,” but defining who she actually wants to be in a relationship is still beyond her reach.
Abby expresses the wish to separate herself from being pigeon-holed as Mick Abernathy’s daughter, so-called “Lucky Thirteen,” but soon demonstrates she doesn’t have a desire to behave like a pearl-and-cashmere schoolmarm either—it’s simply a persona she tries on and ultimately rejects. She is intrigued by the fight club, attends frat parties, uses her fake ID to drink at clubs in town, and enjoys playing poker. She struggles to reconcile who she thinks she wants to be with who she actually is.
Abby experiments with dressing up and dancing in ways that invite attention from men, presenting a provocative image even though she criticizes other girls for doing the same thing, without knowing if she even wants to return the attention, which points to the implicit effects of misogyny on a young woman beginning to navigate the world on her own. One of the reasons her attraction to Travis is so powerful is that he is one thing she can undeniably feel she wants. Being with him gives her a foothold in certainty, and she throws herself into it, enthusiastically participating in Travis’s public displays of affection. However, when that decision causes her to be perceived as provocative and jokingly propositioned by a football player in the cafeteria, Abby scrambles to regain control and agency in the situation. She asks Travis to instill “manners” by attacking and injuring the young man even though she previously saw such an attack as problematic. Recontextualizing Travis’s violence as a loving protection in which she takes pride reflects Abby’s struggle to continue to identify her desires and how they define who she is without acknowledging the problematic nature of both Travis’s behavior and the act of recasting it as love.
Although Abby transitions from a place of insecurity to a place of autonomy and self-acceptance, she remains hyperaware of other people’s perceptions of her—a function of her age. Even at the end of the novel, Abby is convinced every other passenger in the airline terminal is taking an interest in their conversation; she is “glaringly aware of prying eyes” (416). Her actions, up to and including getting a Mrs. Maddox tattoo, are meant not only to directly communicate her own embrace of her identity, but also to make a statement to others about how she defines herself. Being “branded” as Mrs. Maddox, as she puts it, sanctions their sexual relationship within the bond of marriage—a final endorsement of traditional sexual politics—and signals to others the image she has chosen.
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