{"id":93,"date":"2005-10-03T23:52:40","date_gmt":"2005-10-04T03:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/2005\/10\/03\/page-1-preview\/"},"modified":"2005-10-03T23:52:40","modified_gmt":"2005-10-04T03:52:40","slug":"page-1-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/2005\/10\/03\/page-1-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"Page -1 = preview"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

  I thought the epigraph to the left of page one (from R. D. Laing’s The Policics of Experience<\/em>) deserves some discussion.  Its placement on the left side a two-page spread, as opposed to on a page by itself undermines its importance, yet it sets the tone for how Russ perceives male-female relationships and expresses them in the novel.  It is easy for the reader to overlook this passage from a 1967 book in order to begin the main text (I admit I did at first).  However, this brief excerpt highlights major points of discussion for Russ.  Laing, using the names Jack and Jill (notice the “J” theme and how nicely that works out) as examples, says that Jack has the power to “invalidate<\/em> [Jill’s] experience” and this sense of a woman needing to be validated is expressed later in the book, when Russ is talking about dating rituals and the need for women to have men acknowledge their existence.  Joanna sums this up when she says that she has said to men: “Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me” (140).  She was at one point dependent on a male to define who she was.<\/p>\n

  Jack, Laing continues, also has the ability to make the Jill doubt herself and question that an experience ever existed, by “shift[ing] the modality<\/em> of her experience from memory to imagination.”  Jeannine, the most conventionally feminine of all the characters (her name resembles the word feminine as well—perhaps that is why she gets so mad when she is called Jeannie, because her name loses some of its audio ties to the adjective she identifies so closely with, or perhaps because no one is listening to her and her needs), has this experience of her memory losing credibility when she decides she wants to marry Cal despite all the inadequacies of their relationship, because she wants to be<\/em> married.  She is daydreaming about being able to tell her mother she is going to have a baby (within the confines of wedlock of course) and “Cal himself hardly figures in this at all, for Jeannine has forgotten his laconism, his passivity, his strange mournfulness…” (131).  I think there are definitely people like this in society today, who get married to be married, but often times, men who have been divorced get remarried more quickly than their spouses to be married and to have someone take care of them, fulfill the role that Jeannine does for Cal (doing the dishes, all the cleaning because who else will do it), so this marriage for marriage’s sake has evolved in the past 30 years but still reinforces the “angel of the home” expectation of women.<\/p>\n

  The last section of Laing explains how this type of manipulating another person continues because you question the sincerity of the accuser: “How can you think such a thing?” and then by placing that doubt and guilt in the accuser’s head, you make them want to prove that they don’t think that way at all.  This allows the cycle to continue, so there are multiple passages in the book where men make women are made to feel guilty and so the cycle of inequality continues. A more extreme example of this is how rape is the woman’s fault because her skirt was too short, she looked at the guy, etc.  Russ is calling the reader’s attention to the fact that society is the way it is partly because of men, and partly because women allow themselves to be manipulated by men.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I thought the epigraph to the left of page one (from R. D. Laing’s The Policics of Experience) deserves some discussion.  Its placement on the left side a two-page spread, as opposed to on a page by itself undermines its importance, yet it sets the tone for how Russ perceives male-female relationships and expresses … Continue reading Page -1 = preview<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}