Be Your Own Subversion (Final)

I used this exact same quote in my third blog post, and I will do the same to introduce my last: Americana folk hero Vic Chesnutt was once asked by a New York Daily News interviewer what influenced his songwriting. "Other people write about the bling and the booty," said Chesnutt. "I write about the pus and the gnats. To me, that's beautiful."

So do Danticat, Bechdel, Allison, Sapphire, Ozick, and Ensler. It, like my use of Chesnutt's quote, is cyclical, with the writing being as much forward-thinking as it is reflective, honoring past writers and experiences in a unique fashion. While the class had only reached Danticat's works by the time I wrote the third blog post, Chesnutt's quote was applicable then, and it is even more applicable now, after immersing ourselves in the ten books we've read this semester. Danticat, Bechdel, Allison, Ozick, Ensler - that "bling" means nothing to them if it isn't caked in pus and a layer of rust. The vision of women in all of the pieces we've read this semester are much less Red Book, much less stereotypically "feminine" (I'd go so far as to say that most 'real' women's literature is as far removed from stereotypical femininity as monster trucks and fly fishing, but this stereotype has yet to escape the unfortunate bra-burning trope it's been assigned since the women's rights movement) and much more in line with Chesnutt's notion of beauty. It's a baby's corpse being found on the street of Port Au Prince and treated like a real child by a cuckold wife. It's in a closeted funeral director slash English teacher and occasional pedarest getting run over by a truck while bringing lumber to the other side of the street. It's in the predestined wide hips of beaten Southern women. And it's in a thirteen year old black girl getting raped by a twentysomething year old woman but interpreting her rape as empowering and an act of romance and self-discovery. The rape "raised her little coochie snorcher to some kind of heaven" in the same way these authors, through playing with and distorting and subverting tropes of fiction, expand the reader's minds and contort whatever our preconceived notions of "women's literature" are into something else entirely.

What do men think of when women's literature is mentioned? What about women? People who don't identify as either gender? The correct answer should be "anything." Take, for example, the depiction of flight in the works of both Danticat and Ozick. Like I mentioned in my last Ozick blog post, flight - birds, angels, even winged insects - are almost always viewed in grand, majestic, empowering terms. Not here. The dead baby in Between the Pool & The Gardenias "wears a butterfly collar," and though she has found life after death through the care of a woman who found her corpse, the fact that she has already died, in addition to having had absolutely no opportunities or mobility in her initial life, equals one poetically bitter medicine for both the audience and characters to choke down. Wings are supposed to be give someone mobility, but these wings from the "butterfly collar" are only granted to the child after she has passed away. It's black humor at its most morbid, although the reference to the 'angel getting their wings' after their humanity has died, while cliche, is not lost here. This also ties into the concept of predestination. Was the baby's fate sealed even before birth? We can only guess with our own individual faith and beliefs, but we know for certain that the child was dealt a heavy hand even before she was born, considering her station in life. Danticat does not explicitly mention destiny in Between The Pool & The Gardenias, but destiny is brought strongly into question in another Krik-Krak story, Children of the Sea.

The male's boat has "white sheets with bright red spots float as our sail." White is a loaded color, as loaded as the sensual, highly sexualized "bright red spots" guiding the Haitians away from oppression, and a reference to the purity and unbending nature of fate and faith. Regardless of whether the couple's life is intended to play out the way it does, the color symbolism Danticat uses connotates the finality, the out-of-handedness, of their situation. Predestination appears even more bluntly in Two or Three Things I Know For Sure. When most of the female characters are "wide-hipped vehicles of predestination," the audience tends to take notice of the author's opinions on fate. In this case, Allison believed fate to be an all-encompassing force which binded her community together, as well as tore them apart, in much the same way fate essentially tore apart the couple in Danticat's short story. While the ideas here are similar, the two authors adopt totally difference tones of voices and approaches, with one being blatant and the other sticking to relative subtletly.

Going beyond predestination's presentation complexities, sexuality pulsed through nearly everything we read this semester. When The Emperor Was Divine, easily the most sterilized book featured over the past few months, was loaded with homoeroticism in the form of horses and stallions and the boy's conflict between becoming a slim jockey or a "big American boy." These are veiled euphemisms for feminity and masculinity, with little room for an androgynous alternative offered to the child. Sexuality was even the focal point in Fun Home, with her father's homosexuality or bisexuality acting as the catalyst for much of his life and his death (or at least by Bechdel's estimation - the audience only knows Allison's perspective on family events, in and of itself another device encountered frequently this term, the unreliable narrator, from Fun Home, The Shawl, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, and individual characters in The Vagina Monologues). Though Bechdel focuses primarily on the darker aspects of sexuality - pedophilia - along with Dorothy Allison, who shined a light on incest, Danticat and Ensler primarily tackled the divisions and cohesiveness between love and sex. For example, Danticat's Night Women hits the audience with the main character's extreme love for her son as well as her unhappy life as a prostitute. It's obvious the mother hates her profession, which is sex just for the sake of sex (and the primary motivation of getting paid). There is no love involved here. Just nerves, science, and organs. While a character in Ensler's The Vagina Monologues says the clitoris is the "only organ in the body designed for pleasure," it is just as capable of feeling pain as any other organ of the body is, which is exactly what the prostitute in Night Women feels every night. Ensler further tackles this idea in I Am An Emotional Creature with the poem "Bad Boys." "He is not the most handsome boy," closes the poem's narrator, "but he's troubled like me." Though the narrator recognizes her boyfriend's looks, his appearance doesn't influence her love for him, showcasing a more mature opinion on romance and sexuality. She does not need him to be "handsome" for her to love him or, presumably, have sex. The same can be said for Sapphire's Precious character. Precious never comments on the looks of the male characters she comes in contact with, and fantasizes about marrying her math teacher, a person most teenage girls probably wouldn't want to ever be associated with beyond class (and sometimes not even then). When she talks about her future husband, all she ever mentions is being happy with him, and leading a romantic life together. Though this will include sex, she doesn't seem to care much for the appearance of her husband; love is one of her primary life motivations. Tying in Bad Boys and Push, the character Marie from Danticat's Between The Pool and The Gardenias says "it's so easy to love somebody, I tell you, when there's nothing else around." Precious, the narrator in Bad Boys - neither of them have parents they can relate to, nor peers they connect deeply with, at least in the beginning. They're looking for love more than anything else. The differences between fucking, sex, and 'making love' are not crystalline truths in our world, they certainly are in the worlds of many of the works we've read this semester.

Destined for Unfulfillment

Unfulfilled destinies are poised like an electric spiderweb over the characters in The Shawl and Two or Three Things I Know For Sure.

Though the characters in these books could not come from more divergent backstories, the end is always the same: they are predestined to live unfulfilling lives in the service of cruel monotony or crippling suppression. It binds them together when they normally would care to live apart. "She knew little about Magda's mind at this age, or whether she had any talents - even what her intelligence toward," says Rosa, imagining what her daughter's personality might have been like had she survived the concentration camps. While Rosa was quick to initially point out "there might be something amiss with her intelligence" when Magda lacked a voice in the camps, this does not stop the mother from speculating - wishing, really - that her child grew into success later on in life. Her speculation could be seen as a direct challenge to predestination - was Magda genuinely as unintelligent or as stunted as she seemed, and could her early death be seen as a fulfillment of her destiny to die young before she realizes her handicap, as people who have handicaps often due later in life, an act of mercy? - or is a paeon to a destiny that was ultimately sideswiped by the Nazis, outside forces? Destiny is usually portrayed as immutable, but Ozick's vision of destiny seems to be fragile, as fragile and as malleable and as symbolic as the lettuce carried by the woman on the train. Ozick wants us to continually question the role destiny does, or does not, play in The Shawl and life itself, in much the same way Rosa butts heads with predestination every time she writes a letter to her dead daughter. Men and tradition, as well the women themselves, serve the same purpose as the Nazis do in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. However, Allison's vision of destiny is much less ambiguous and much less open to the idea of change in comparison to Ozick's.

Destiny is, perhaps, a product of the environment in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. "We were hard and ugly and trying to be proud of it. The poor are plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly. Almost always ugly," says Allison. Allison's interpretation of southern tradition is less than comforting. It's a good ol' boys club and the women aren't even afforded the luxury of fluidity. They can't bend nor exaggerate , or create their own path in life because everything - life, men, preformed, long-held ideas - are so stacked against these women. Women in Allison's world are indoctrinated the moment they are born into the community. Opportunities outside the beaten path are virtually non-existent, and if they do exist, the resistance must seem damning. Hardness and toughness and virtousness and tenacity are beautiful traits (I mean, the era of the wilting flower is over, right?), but not when they are essentially forced upon an entire subsect of people, as they are in Allison's neighborhood. Allison's more explicitly physical description of the women in her community furthers this idea. "Solid, stolid, wide-hipped baby machines. We were all wide-hipped and predestined," says Allison. The emphasis placed on "wide-hipped," as well as "predestined," juxtaposes the physical with the metaphysical, suggesting destiny is as much 'written in the stars' as it is written in the village and in the heart.

Lie

String theory doesn't always have to be mired in quantum physics or relativity. Sometimes the simplest of concepts - suppression, imprisonment - are just as relevant to the theory than anything more scientific.

When The Emperor Was Divine and The Shawl are spiritual companions; there is no doubt in my mind that these two novels were chosen one after the other for this exact reason. However, while Otsuka covers forced imprisonment, Ozick covers something significantly more complicated than that. Rosa's state can't be limited to just one, or two, or even multiple reasons. It's a combination, perhaps - of both forced suppresion and freely willed stiflement - as well as guilt, transference, revenge, anger, exasperation, and hatred. Rosa's Florida is as much an internment camp as the Japanese-Americans had to endure, although of an entirely different nature, one which goes well beyond the fact that Rosa has the illusion of choice and the Japanese family did not. While Japanese prisoners could not speak because of the desert's "chalky white dust," the same can be said for Florida. "In Florida there is no air," says Rosa. "There is only thin syrup seeping into the esophagus." Rosa may not speak for everyone else in Florida, but her assertion that Florida's air flows as thick as syrup and can obstruct the voice by the very virtue of its existence is a ghoulish way of describing muteness, as well as acting as a throwback to Rosa's tenure as a prisoner. Of course, unlike the camps, where the Nazis were responsible for stifling dissention and the voices of others, nature is the sole catalyst in Florida. Is Rosa directly comparing nature to Nazis, where both exert pressures onto others, or is this comparison meant to be an even wider claim? Nazis, too, were at the whims of nature (their march into Russia solidifies this), and it is a remarkably mature - as well as a remarkably sane - way for Rosa to think when the Nazis are the easiest face to blame for her problems. As someone who feels "a lock removed from the tongue" at all times, Rosa's 'unlocked' mouth is still unable to voice her concerns to understanding ears. She may have a loose tongue, but how loose is it really? Rosa obviously has no trouble telling Persky off. Nature - the air, the nature of people, reality - has caused Rosa's voice to be disembodied completely even while she remains an intelligent, thought-provoked, and thought-provoking woman with a contradictory and inverted facade. Though her "tongue is chained to the teeth and the palate," her mind, and therefore the guiding light behind her speech, is so far removed from the mouth that her inner thoughts are the only vehicle by which she even has a voice to speak, ears to listen, and a heart to understand. Magda, with her gleaming, developing teeth, isn't so different from her mother afterall.They have mouths, tongues, teeth - but no voice to share between them. The shawl and the air have taken this away from the mother and daughter, and as the shawl suppressed Magda's voice, it too has developed into an oppresor for Rosa's inner feelings.

Magda, however, differs from Rosa in one substantial way. Rosa can lie. "To retrieve, to reprieve, to lie," says Rosa while she stumbles through a hotel's backyard. Though said in "vile" reference to the two men Mr. Finkelstein "harbors" on the beach, Rosa's statement has much wider implications. For example, "to lie" can just as easily relate to "men laying with other men" - a stark if relatively ambiguous reference to the Nazi parties' substantial number of gay men in their upper ranks - as it can to Rosa's memory playing tricks on her, or to her obtuse behavior towards Stella (justifiable or not), or to an even grander comment on the illusions retrospection plays in determining how a given event affects a life. It's most likely intended to be a combination. Ozick loves to play with words as much as she loves to play with the audience, and it wouldn't surprise me if Rosa has created her own memories just as easily as she may have forgotten some. Afterall, she mentions nothing of her rapes beyond one brief but straightforward sentence saying Germans "forced" her, while the topic of Magda is constantly mulled over in her head time and time again. Rosa seems to care more for the /end result/ of actions, rather than for the actions which /caused/ the result, hence why Stella is subjected to her anger rather than the Nazis. It's just the way her mind functions, although we have no idea if she was like this prior to being imprisoned. Regardless, to the audience, Rosa's memory is increasingly selective and unreliable. Likewise, Rosa is also something of a contradictory character. Though decrying Dr. Tree to "drop in a hole" for the sterile, emotionally distant language he uses in his letters to her, Rosa is quite the prude herself, as seen by her reactions to the men on the beach. Of course, all illusions of Rosa's prudishness are totally shattered every time she picks up a pen to address Magda, in which she utilizes flowery, evocative words to indulge her fantasies.

Fantasy is bolstered by disconnect, and Ozick blames Rosa's problems on disconnection. "She was unconnected to anything," says Ozick's blunt narration, in typical tense-switching fashion (I wonder if Rosa would agree with Ozick's statement that she is unconnected to anything; what about Magda's ghost? Does Magda's ghost even count, or is that just an extension of Rosa herself?). Shortly after this point Rosa comes to a gate which "belongs to one of the big hotels." Even something as inconsequential as a gate /belongs/ (this word is used explicitly here, and with good reason) somewhere. It's a cruel but striking depiction of Rosa's situation. If she doesn't feel connected to anything, or anyone, should Rosa even have any obligations to "join a club or something" like Stella says? To our knowledge, no one beyond Persky has gone the extra distance to bring Rosa down to a more relatable level, and it is for this reason that the audience has difficulty faulting Rosa for any of her behaviors, regardless of how foreign they may seem. Matters only grow more distressing for Rosa. Upon entering the hotel, Rosa's dress and mannerisms should cause her to stick out, yet even while "she hears their yells" - cooks, men laying with men, hotel staff, everyone - "it has nothing to do with her." Rosa is invisible to all but Persky, even at her most deviant, suggesting Persky may not be as entirely "normal" as Rosa believes.

Birds of a Feather Hate Alone

Free as a bird. From The Beatles to Lynyrd Skynyrd, American nomenclature to artistic symbolism, this birds equal freedom mentality has been shoved down our collective consciousness to the point where most of us probably want to shoot the bird down instead of fly away with it.

Not here. Ozick, in a dramatic subversion of common cliches, equates birds to ugliness. "The big gold mirror, you look in it at your bitter face," begins Rosa as she describes Stella from her point of view. "I don't care how pretty, even so it's bitter - and your forget who gave you presents." Though Stella may be considered an attractive woman to all but Rosa, Rosa still looks upon her niece with the same birdishness she presented in the internment camp. Between using words like "knobbiness" and "gawkishness" to describe Stella's appearance as a child, as well as the juxtaposition of the family's hopeless situation against birds usually flying united and without ties, birds are not beautiful in Rosa's perspective. They are fragile, loud, ugly, and dependent creatures. For example, swans may be beautiful to look at, but they're also amongst the most violent and territorial creatures in the animal kingdom. Ozick gives dualities to normally glazed-over symbols when no one else cares to indulge realism in favor of their own vision. These are the negative and wholly realistic aspects of birds which are never given a voice outside Audobon journals and National Geographic editions. Allegorically, the realistic depiction of birds versus the sensationalized, culturally-infused view of the animals mirrors Ozick's damning look at what it means to be a "survivor" of the Holocaust brought in direct opposition to whatever Hollywood or less forward-thinking authors could think up about the same topic.

The bird comparison is not aimed at just Stella. Not even Magda escapes Rosa's subversive damning of these creatures - or, rather, the inaccurately flattering portrayals of these creatures. In words which sound more like a scared fledgling leaving a nest for the first time, rather than a young child escaping from their mother's watchfulness, Magda hobbles or lopes or skitters away from whatever safety she may have had to "howl" for her mother. Magda is mute, may be deaf, and might be dumb (at least from Rosa's unreliable perspective), much like a newborn hatchling. Children don't behave this way, but Ozick's metaphor is so elaborately constructed that the audience can virtually imagine Magda, long-necked, beaked, and strident, crying out for the comfort of her mother in a comfortless situation. Anthropomorphisizing a character who has more in common with another species than their own humanity is not only a brilliant way for Ozick to subvert commonly held beliefs, but to reinforce others - that it's sometimes easier or less emotionally trying to relate to animals than it is to humanity - as well.

With so much breath given to crucifying Stella the audience . This is intentional. Ozick wants us to blame Stella to prove Rosa's point - that "my Warsaw is not your Warsaw." That no one can understand Rosa unless "thieves took it," 'it' being the essence of your purpose. It's a direct challenge to the audience. Since Rosa never outright blames the Nazis for her troubles, Stella is the closest target. She is the subject of Rosa's revenge. Though Rosa may be an unreliable narrator cut from the same cloth of other famous examples like Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye or Alex from A Clockwork Orange, readers often take the relationship between themselves and the protaganist at face value. Ozick could very easily have made the audience feel betrayal - build up trust with the audience and swiftly turn the protanist into the antagonist as the story progresses to some kind of climax - but she ultimately never does because we are never intended to fully trust Rosa, even from the beginning of The Shawl. The fact that the story never officially ends also has something to do with this ambiguity. "Her Polish was very dense," says Ozick when describing Rosa's speech. "You had to open it out like a fan to get at all the meanings." This description applies not only to Rosa's character, but also to Ozick's writing style, as well. Since we can not hear Rosa actually speaking, Ozick's writing style is the closest example we have to "very dense" Polish. It's elaborate, intellectual, and vastly layered to the point where multiple readings are necessary to dissect the novella.

Even close dissections, however, do not reveal a definitive reason for why Rosa never outright blames the Nazis - the only party responsible - for her hardships in Poland. "In Poland there used to be justice," muses Rosa to Persky. Not when the Holocaust came around. Referring to Nazis only as "Germans" or "S.S. men" in both pieces, these are abnormally kind euphemisms coming from a woman who "was forced by a German (there's that euphemism again), it's true, and more than once." Rosa turns whatever hatred she should 'probably' feel for the Nazis into revenge against Stella and contempt against a Jewish hotel owner, referring to Mr. Finkelstein only as "the red wig," a title suggesting clownishness or, at an even more extreme level, transsexuality or crossdressing. It's I against I from Rosa's perspective, and it's a striking subversion against the 'birds of a feather flock together' mentality that is toyed with and twisted by Ozick's cleverness earlier in The Shawl.

Shut Up and Survive

The Shawl is less a story and more an indictment.

On a painfully basic level, it's an indictment against the Nazis. It's even an indictment against the Jews themselves - "Aryan," Stella said, in a voice grown thin as string, and Rosa thought how Stella gazed at Magda like a young cannibal" - whose thirst for vengeance outweighed their desire to survive, to remember, to impart knowledge to those afterwards. To never forget to remember "my Warsaw is not your Warsaw." It's an indictment against Europeans, too, whose inaction is to blame for much of the pain exacted against minorities during Hitler's ascendancy. It's a subtle indictment against Americans. But most of it all, the short story levels it's criticisms at the Germans who hid. The Germans who were 'just following orders'. The Germans who did not speak up. The Germans who plunged their faces into their "magic shawls" to shield themselves from what was really going on in their country. The short story's title, itself, is an ironic and pointedly sardonic jab at the non-Nazi Germans tendency to obfuscate themselves in the face of self-terrorism. It's always even easier to hide rather than fight. The Shawl isn't so much a shawl as it is a symbol. To Ozick, the inactive Germans might as well have been Nazis themselves.

The character Magda is an allegory for the quiet Germans. Is it any coincidence that Ozick dedicates much of the few pages within to explaining what Magda looks like, in addition to clearly showing Rosa and Stella's reactions to the child's appearance? Ozick doesn't even describe Rosa, and while Stella's appearance is clearer to the audience, we are only shown generalities like "knobbiness" and "coldness" rather than specifics, as is the case with Magda. The thoughts of the author, as well as the thoughts of the two thinking characters, are heavily focused on "the face, very round, a pocket mirror of a face: but it was not Rosa's bleak complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa's coat. You could think she was one of their babies." When an author devotes an entire paragraph towards describing a character's teeth as "an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there," the audience better pay attention to what the writer is doing here. Magda could have been a German based on appearances alone and, considering her tendency to "suck air" often, she was, at least symbolically.

According to Rosa, "Magda was mute," and "she never cried." It isn't coincidental that the first time Magda opens up her mouth is when the shawl, an oppressive symbol, is taken away from her by Stella. "Magda, in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil legs, was howling," describes Rosa as her child wanders vulnerably into the open. Magda isn't just talking, either. She's howling. This is behavior usually reserved for performance poets like Allen Ginsberg; not babies. Rosa even subconsciously recognizes this fact, because she fears that "Magda would put the shawl in her mouth and turn dumb again." It visualizes a turning point in the behavior of both Rosa and Magda. Rosa begins to see how important the voice, and speaking out is in regards to individuality; Magda begins to develop a voice of her own. Of course, the penalty for speaking out is death, and it isn't a painless lesson for Rosa when she watches a soldier toss her child into an electric fence. Ozick is commenting, indirectly, on the nature of shutting up and surviving - if it can really be considered survival - and speaking one's mind but dying corporeally. Through incredibly Though Stella is indeed viewed by Rosa as a cruel person, she is incidentally the reason behind Magda developing singularity, individualism, her own voice - "it was the first noise Magda had ever sent out from her throat since the drying up of Rosa's nipples." Without Stella, Magda never would have had the experience to speak her mind, nor would she have been killed by a soldier during that point. We are essentially asked to question which fate would have been better for Magda: speak up and die, or remain quiet and survive. It isn't an easy decision to make.

Family Ties That Bind

When The Emperor Was Divine has its foundations in color and its criticisms highlighted through the many shades of prejudice associated with color.
"Nobody will look at you," the sister says to the boy as they enter the concentration camp, "if your face is too dark." "Nobody's looking at me anyway," replied the boy." His sister is showing her young age here. She assumes darker is a horrendous plight, a handicap, perhaps because she has succumbed to whatever views her mother, her peers, and her country might have told her about darker skin - but from the boy's younger, more immature, more fresh-faced perspective, color does not matter. Apparently, color matters very little to the Japanese-Americans the family is surrounded by, because nobody pays attention to the boy even when his skin eventually darkens from the skin. He’s as much a prisoner as everyone else is regardless of whether his skin is a leathery tan or an ivory white. Excusing the white horse imagery, the boy's impressions have yet to be completely destroyed by whatever influences American culture would normally exert on him, and it shows in the way he describes everything throughout his chapter. Look at his description of one of the camp’s guards: "He had brown hair and green eyes, or maybe they were blue, and he had just come back from a tour of the Pacific." While the boy’s offhanded statement about the guard’s eyes may imply reverse racism – for example, him assuming that all white people have light eyes – I see this more as a devil-may-care expression. Color simply doesn’t matter to a child when they haven’t been indoctrinated to believe color has certain connotations within a society.

Likewise, color extends beyond uniting people together. It also tears people apart from one another. "The boy did not have a best friend but he had a pet tortoise that he kept in a wooden box filled with sand right next to the barrack window" furthers previous claims that, despite every Japanese-American being in the camp for roughly the same reason - "they all looked alike, black hair, slanted eyes, high cheekbones, thick glasses, thin lips, bad teeth" - they are all bitterly alone in their struggles. All the family has is each other, if that, but even if they don’t, at least the desert’s dust prevents one static constant.

"Always, he would remember the dust. It was soft and white and chalky, like talcum powder. It made your nose bleed. It made your eyes sting,” says the boy. Not everything white is a positive thing, and it takes away your persona. Your cultural identity. “It took your voice away,” the boy says. It literally prevents you from speaking out. The whiteness strips you of everything that makes the boy, everything that makes a person who they are, everything that makes you, 'you'. However, the color is simply a symbol for cultural degradation. Otsuka is not implicating all white people, or even white people in any capacity, small or large, as the catalyst for bastardizing the family's values. In fact, Joe Lundy and the soldier on the train are portrayed sympathetically; they're as much victims of a "whitewashed" culture as the Japanse-Americans are. I mean, just look at what the dust is, as well as what it does. Dust is cultureless, homogenized, ugly. It's beyond the realm of human color. It's the basic element of so many greater sums, dirt and sand and grains, yet those small specks of dust are all it takes to completely wash away any trace of the boy's presence in the desert. "One evening, before he went to bed, he wrote his name in the dust across the top of the table. All through the night, while he slept, more dust blew through the walls. By morning his name was gone," notes the narration. Like all traces of the family getting removed from their home after they are imprisoned, and the father’s forced removal in his slippers and bathrobe, identity is a fragile entity prone to being erased by forces beyond the family’s control.

"The shoes were black Oxfords," begins the boy as he describes a paternal heirloom he took to the camp. Remember the umbrella the boy was unable to fit into his suitcase when he was packing? He never mentioned bringing along his father's shoes instead of the umbrella. The umbrella would've been a far practical object for the boy to take along, yet he must have felt his father's shoes were the more important heirloom to bring along than a thing which grants purely physical comfort during times many people find discomforting. It's a willing disregard for practicality. However, he anticipated the shoes would be more useful to him, reminding him of his father and boosting his "mental climate" better than any umbrella ever could. And unlike his sister, he does not blame his father for being absent in the family's life. "You know what bothers me sometimes? I can't remember his face sometimes," complains the girl to her brother. "Me." It bothers /her/ that /she/ can't remember what /her/ father looks like. The sister is only thinking about her father in relation to herself. Although the family's circumstances may lend some sympathy to the girl's way of thinking, it's still selfish for her to see her father as paternal object, especially when the boy does not let his situation interfere with his adoration for papa. While the boy continuously wonders how Papa (notice how he only refers to the father as "papa" rather than "his/her father" like the girl does?) is doing throughout his chapter, the girl defers to papa as "her father" only. The boy's seethingly obvious lack of age - he's only eight years old at the beginning of the novel - has this bizarre way of making him more mature than both his mother and sister. He does not need a father figure present in his life to know he's loved when all he needs to do is close his eyes and reminisce. To hold his father's shoes is enough reassurance. "He took them out of his suitcase and slipped them over his hands and pressed his fingers into the smooth oval depressions left behind by his father's toes and then he closed his eyes and sniffed the tips of his fingers. Tonight they smelled like nothing." Though the days when the father used to refer to the boy as his “absolute numero one” (this co-opting of a Spanish phrase by a Japanese-American family strikes me as ironic) are over, the boy still has not forgotten the face of his father like his sister may have, and his father’s lessons – “when to leave the boy’s mother alone and how best to ask her for ice cream,” for example – are not something even dust can erase.

Hazy Deja Vu

What if the woman, the girl, and the boy were taken to prison while the man was left alone at home? Chapter Two's introduction offers the audience a glimpse into this alternate reality. "Somewhere along the western edge of upper Nevada it passed a lone white house with a lawn and two tall cottonwood trees with a hammock between them gently swaying in the breeze," begins the narration. The deju vu here is hazy but strongly felt. Between "a small dog lay sleeping on its side in the shade of the trees" and the hedge's "perfect green spheres," it's like the family's home in Berkeley exists outside its original confines. It has been transposed to an entirely different locale with entirely different people, in this case "a man with a straw hat trimming hedges." In addition to conjuring subconscious but plaintively bared throwback memories in the girl - in fact, much of the chapter is as much dedicated to the girl's memories of living elsewhere as it is to living in the moment, as much about "tossing lemons out into the desert" as it is the girl telling Ted about her father buying shoes in Paris years earlier, "fancy ones with little holes punched in the leather" - could Otsuka be challenging the audience to speculate what would have happened to the family if the roles had been reversed, with the man taking on the roles of father, mother, groundskeeper, and child while the rest of his family was taken away? The prominence of the house in the introduction, the explicit mention of its "wooden picket fence" and "victory garden," as well as Otsuka's extensively uncharacteristic description of a seemingly unimportant object makes me think the idea wasn't far from the author's consciousness. Likewise, there is also the nostalgia angle to consider. Chapter 2 soaks in the girl's memories of past events; considering the girl's heavy notice of the house in the beginning, did spotting the house spur much of the girl's narration and experiences throughout the rest of the chapter? The girl does not make the connection, the reminders, between her "white stucco house" in Berkeley to the "lone white house" in Nevada explicit, but that is the point of minimalism. The two house share more than just similar colors. They share moods, tonalities, essences. Despite Berkeley's urbanity, the family's house - it's community - was as alone as the house in Nevada is. The family's uniqueness is what makes them alone in relation to their surroundings in Berkeley: their Japanese-American background, their wealth, even the woman's unusual individuality during a time when woman were rarely individuals, her smoking habit and habit of wearing dresses above her knees. Though the family was surrounded by people all the time in Berkeley, they were surrounded by few people they /connected/ with on the same level as their own experiences allowed. The family is a microcosm. This disconnect continues well beyond Berkeley and into the crowded Tanforan racetrack and onto the even busier train, and will likely continue for the rest of their lives. Further experiences in the internment camps will likely only push them farther away from others and closer to each other. We need to read between the lines here. In essence, the house is a literary MacGuffin, because while it doesn't seem to be all that important to the reader, it actually guides the girl's narration for the rest of the chapter - and in effect our reading experiences. The entire chapter seems to be a blatant meditation on earlier events as seen through the lens of the current moment: and a meditation on current moments as seen through previous experiences. Even something as minute as the girl not knowing what the word intermittent means is informed by having "been a good but not outstanding student who had learned the meanings of many words" in a past life. On a much wider scale, Otsuka is indicating the importance of time, of experiences, of accumulation. For a book with relatively little indication of time, When The Emperor Was Divine presents facts in a starkly linear fashion, with each past experience building onto current experiences. The opposite could also be said, as each recent experience can be clearly unfolded onto itself into a million pieces of a past moment. Time, like most of the themes in Otsuka's novel, is an important but understated device.

As most of our class discussions have reiterated, criticisms for Otsuka's novel are frequently levelled at the sparseness of her language, and the lack of outright passion in the words. After coming off reading a book as brazenly passionate as Push, the divergences can be especially jarring. I disagree. Though the audience may see When The Emperor Was Divine as "whitewashed" as the stable walls at the Tanforan racetrack where the family spent nearly the last half-year, the novel's emotion comes through in invisible waves: we are supposed to find emotion in what isn't stated, as well as what lies in between the lines, rather than in the barely-there language Otsuka evokes. We're challenged to ply deconstructive theory to glean anything but the most obvious and shallow bits of information from Otsuka's writing. That's the beauty of minimalism. While minimalism isn't for everyone, and in fact many people may outright hate the novel's disconnect, those with particularly vivid imaginations will feel the novel on a grander, heartwrenching scale than any other type of writing. The girl's character seeps through every conceivable pore in the second chapter, and even though Otsuka's writing style is exactly the same in the second chapter as it was in the first, the chapter is an entirely new experience for the audience. For example, let's look at one of the first scenes aboard the train: "Don't lose that arm," her mother said under her breath. "I wasn't planning on it," said the girl," moments after hurling a lemon out a train window." Otsuka has told us an abundance about these two characters, and their relationship with one another, in two short sentences. Two short sentences totally devoid of adjectives, inner thoughts, nor any indication of /how/ the characters say what they say. The author writes like a journalist - does she ever use a word other than 'said' to end a quote? - but thinks like a fiction writer. Regardless of the unadorned quotations, the audience can easily imagine the mother adopting a cautionary smirk, or the girl scoffingly looking at her mother. Otsuka doesn't need to clutter her writing with unnecessary description because our minds, and her sparse prose, evoke even more vivid descriptions without them. The burden lies as much on the author as it does on the audience; it's interactive storytelling at its finest.

Gothic Pallor

The man went to the library and walked over to the online catalog. The weather had chilled, so the leather jacket he wore for warmth hissed as he sat on the chair. It felt good to sit down, he thought. Typing a few words into the keyboard, he found what I was looking for, a book called When The Emperor Was Divine, and wrote down where the novella was located and went to retrieve it promptly. The library's floorboards crackled in time with the rustling of his leather coat.

Do I sound like Julie Otsuka yet?

Forgive the patronizing tone, because I absolutely love Otsuka's minimalism, but just look at the bottom of the first page: "She no longer had to squint but she squinted out of habit anyway. She read the sign from top to bottom anyway and then, still squinting, she took out a pen and read the sign from top to bottom again. The print was small and dark. Some of it was tiny. She wrote down a few words on the back of a bank receipt, then turned around and went home and began to pack." Of course, to say I'm on par with Otsuka is ridiculous. She's a baroque wordsmith, and I am not. This is writing intended to be read aloud. Between the many lists - "There were things they could take with them: bedding and linen, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, cups, clothes" - enunciated syllables, and journalistically short sentences, the story stays in the audience's head freshly and readily. You know Japanese wood carvings? Otsuka's writing is the cerebral equivalent, lotus blossoms, pallid faces, willowy, depressive figures, all etched simply.

Speaking of pallor, the color white makes frequent appearances in When The Emperor Was Divine. "She crossed California Street and bought several bars of Lux soap and a large jar of face cream at the Rumford Pharmacy." Lux soap is of great significance to Asian culture; specifically in regards to skin lightening. Asian women apparently go to ridiculous lengths to achieve the whitest skin possible because it is seen as immensely attractive by their society as a whole, that ivory pallor, and when you consider the 1940s setting as well as the American backdrop, the woman's desire to have whiter skin is much more understandable. She may just want to be seen as an American, to blend in or be accepted without issue, rather than viewed as a Japanese-American or, at worst, a foreigner despite living in America for over fifteen years. We ultimately don't know what the woman's motivations are, however. What I do know, though, is of Lux's strong connection to the goth subculture. It may seem ridiculous, but on the advice of some friends, I ordered Lux whitening soap from the Philippines last summer under the pretense it would make my skin bone-white. Well, it didn't exactly do this, but that doesn't stop the Lux brand from advertising itself as a skin lightener nor being commonly accepted as the best way to achieve lighter skin by mainstream Asian society (in my opinion, never mind the whitening aspect; it's capabilities as a moisturizer are overlooked and if Lux had a stronger presence in the US Dove would more forgotten than Ozymandias). The heavy presence of the color white goes way beyond just skin tone, as well: White Dog, dresses, frocks, soap itself, films, Dorothy Lamour (who, despite having olive skin, looked Irish-pale in pictures and movies during the time), moonlight, teeth.

"Teeth don't count."
"Teeth are essential."

Names are usually seen as essential, too. Names are fundamental to identity. "Thank you, Joe." Then the door slammed behind her and she was alone on the sidewalk and she realized that in all the years she had been going to Joe Lundy's store she had never before called him by his name. Joe. It sounded strange to her. Wrong, almost. But she had said it. She had said it loud. She had wished she had said it earlier," remarks the woman. Why is it that the Japanese-American family is never named - indeed, the woman doesn't even call her children anything other than "the boy" or "the girl" throughout the novel - yet the untitled woman calls others, people outside their family, by their first names with little hesitation? Even White Dog, an animal who is killed like an animal, is technically named. Otsuka may be trying to say something here, whether it's a comment on Japanese culture as a whole, or simply a remark about the family's tenacity and modesty, as their reluctance to attach names to themselves speaks loudly when juxtaposed against outside influences.

Perhaps the family's namelessness was intended to twist cultural statements, which are not usually seen as malleable, into something else entirely. "She took The Gleaners out of its frame and looked at the picture one last time. She wondered why she had let it hang in the kitchen for so long. It bothered her, the way those peasants were forever bent over above that endless field of wheat," says the woman. In either a darkly ironic statement, or a boldly defiant declaration, Otsuka plays around with Asian typicality: that women are wilting flowers, banded feet, well-poised objects of subservience. Considering Otsuka mentions "the woman, who did not always follow the rules, followed the rules" when describing her thoughts towards moving into the internment camps, in addition to emphasizing her individualistic streak with phrases like "sitting down on the landing with her dress pushed up above her knees and lighting a cigarette," (a woman smoking and wearing a dress above the knee during the 40s virtually spells out a lack of adherence to social mores) using The Gleaners painting and the woman's reaction to its realism is symbolically defiant - as well as foreshadowing the station, that of chattel, which the woman and her family will later occupy in the internment camp. Further imprisonment symbolism appears moments after the woman releases the family macaw from its cage. "Without the bird in the cage, the house felt empty," muses the woman, with deafening irony. In addition to being an obvious allusion to internment camps, the irony - that a house would feel empty without a captive soul within it - is biting. Cloak-and-dagger irony seems to be Otsuka's favorite vehicle to convey imagery and emotion, because the woman's emotional responses to outside events, nor her own inner thoughts, are rarely described in detail. Instead, they are shown to the audience, leaving meaningful interpretation of characters up to the readers.

Classroom Savagery

Mr. Wicher and Precious have a bizarre relationship. Though both characters share little screen time together, the few pages where they do interact with one another explore a unique dynamic, with malleable Precious fulfilling the noble savage stereotype to Mr. Wicher's cultured European.

For a child like Precious, who wants little more than to "change my seat to the front of the class," one would assume she'd be something of a teacher's pet, trying her best to please Mr. Wicher by whatever means necessary. Of course, assumptions don't even work for the status quo, which is definitely something Precious doesn't belong to. What the audience sees instead is a combination between classroom enforcer, willing but unable learner, brown-noser, and adversarial disruption. She creates a classroom persona around her intensely mercurial emotions. How many students could one second claim to confront the teacher angrily - "his face is red, he is shaking" - to genuinely exclaiming "shut up mutherfuckers I'm trying to learn something" to her classmates moments afterwards? It seems like most of the moments in Precious' math class are equally full of these dualities. "Mr. Wicher look at me confuse but grateful," says Precious, proudly, after "keeping those rowdy niggers in line" during math class. It's behavior more fitting for a warzone than a math classroom. Furthermore, Precious elaborates her defined role within Mr. Wicher's classroom to the audience by saying she's "like the polices for Mr. Wicher, I keep law and order," and of course, here is where the reality lines start to blur together. "I like him, I pretend he is my husband and we live somewhere in Wesschesser, wherever that is," muses Precious. Although Mr. Wicher "don't come to school looking like some of those nasty ass teachers," it is probably incredibly odd to the audience to imagine a teenage girl attaching herself to a math teacher who isn't particularly attractive-looking instead of someone like, say, (generic choices ahead) Brad Pitt or Orlando Bloom or some other hunk-of-the-month seen on the covers of girl-mags. What's most interesting to me, though, is that Precious makes no remarks about the physical attractiveness of any of the (admittedly few) male characters she comes in contact with throughout Push. For a teenager living in an increasingly image-based society, it's not only expected but even encouraged peerwise to make remarks about hot guys or people she'd love to crassly fuck, but she shows little signs of real shallowness. She justs wants a man to love her, regardless of what they may look like. It's touching and realistic, as depressed people generally lack an interest in sex, if a little jarring to an audience expecting to read the equivalent to a rambling teenybopper's diary throughout Push.

According to Precious, Mr. Wicher says she "has an aptitude for maff." This is confusing. Is Mr. Wicher mistaking Precious' class enforcer role for "maff" skills? Doubtful. Does he just feel bad for the girl, like he owes Precious some blase compliments in return for protecting him? I mean, pardon the excessive vanity of my language and everything, but how the hell does Mr. Wicher know Precious has any latent math talents if all she does, by her own admission, is sit down and shut up in class? Precious doesn't even recall the last time she wrote anything down the first time Miz Rain asks the class to keep a journal in Each One Teach One. In fact, she panics - she cries, wondering if she even belongs in Miz Rain's class because she can't do nearly everyone else can. Mr. Wicher really doesn't know Precious. He doesn't know Precious at all beyond whatever front she chooses to present in class that particular day. These empty compliments are all said to placate her, a "troubled student," from interrupting his teaching, and it's a common affront I absolutely have an issue with. Mr. Wicher is an enabler. Mr. Wicher leads her on. Mr. Wicher is just like all of the other professionals who have failed Precious, only his special brand of caring but not really caring comes in "a dope suit." I find it fitting that Sapphire chose to make a Mr. Wicher a male instead of female character, like the rest of the more important characters in Push, to illustrate how Precious' - and on an even grander scale, any "problem childs'" - welfare falls not on just one sex, one gender identity, one parent, nor one ethnicity. Blaming the mother? Well, what about the teacher who pity-passed a struggling student because he was too lazy to help out, or the counselor who didn't intervene when she knew a client was being beaten by her father? These parties are all equally responsible for passing the child's problem on to another person. It should be everyone's burden to bare, because it does take a village to raise a child - as well as a village destroy one unequivocally.

Dear Mr. Fantasy

Precious' life is as fantastical as her name would suggest. She's married to a white math teacher, lives in Westchester, is well-loved by both of her parents, and lights up the Apollo Theater as the best dancer the venue has ever seen. Of course, none of this is actually real. It all takes place inside her head.

I was struck immediately by the allegorical comparisons Sapphire creates between rape and dancing. Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz," a famous poem which compares a father's abuse of his son to a dance, a waltz, where the father's "whiskey stained breath" clings to his son like fists choking the life out of the child, runs paralellel to Push. Sapphire's uses Roethke's imagery and comparisons, that of a child retreating into a dance-like fantasy whenever they are abused by their father, throughout much of her novel. "Then I change stations, change bodies. I be dancing in videos! In movies! I be breaking, fly just a dancin'! Uhm humm heating up the stage at the Apollo for Doug E. Fresh or Al B. Shure. They love me! Say I'm one of the best dancers ain' no doubt of or about that!" However, unlike "My Papa's Waltz," which humanizes the father to some extent so we can understand why he is so abusive towards his child, none of this is present in Push. Instead, the audience is shown a father who basks in sleazy dualities. Dad compliments Precious (if it can be called a 'compliment') with "I'm gonna marry you," only to follow it up with "you as wide as the Mississppi" in the same sentence. Precious doesn't only retreat into fantasy when her father rapes her, either, as seen when she is "walking down Lennox when bad thoughts hit me I space out" to her first day at Each One Teach One. Additionally, fantasy is one of the few ways Precious copes with what she feels is a lack of intelligence - a disconnect from normalcy - on her part.

"Push the button, stupid, I tell myself. I push the button; I'm not stupid, I tell myself." There is abundant indecisiveness in nearly all of Precious' actions and reactions. Precious is shown projectig the same "mixed signals" her father thrusts onto her; it's all portrayed as a cyclical experience. Her self-image is topsy-turvy; she is at once confident and tough, but uncertain and vulnerable at the same time. In contrast to Precious' near-bullying attitude in Mr. Wicher's class, her reflections regarding her father - or lack thereof, really - approach gingerly stated levels of regret, uncertainty, and misunderstanding. "If he did he would I was like a white girl, a /real/ person, inside," muses Precious, noting how her father cares little for his daughter beyond shallow sexual gratification. Additionally, the 'white girl' symbolism, the dualities between black and white, is a repeated theme in Push. Although Precious boastingly says she believes Louis Farrakhan's stance that "crackers is the cause of everything bad," her actions, even the majority of her words, signal an altogether different (as well as confusing) opinion. While doting upon Mr. Wicher, she curses out Mrs. Lichenstein, for seemingly arbitrary reasons. To Precious, Mrs. Lichenstein is a "fat-ass bitch" irregardless of her being one of the few professionals who expresses an interest in helping her. It doesn't matter; what I noticed about Precious is her tendency to lash out at most of the women in her life, aggressively and defensively tossing around words like "bitch," "cunt bucket", and "whore" without consideration. With a mother like hers, should he even have a high opinion of other women in general? White men are barely even addressed throughout the book, but white women? At every turn. White women, black women, Jewish women, Spanish women; excepting the Spanish nurse who delivered Mongo, Carl, and Mr. Wicher, there is no such thing as a male presence in Push. Precious constantly makes demeaning remarks regarding how light-skinned certain black women are, especially in relation to the nurses at the hospital and her psychiatrist. Sapphire intentionally made nearly all of the characters in Push female. In addition to giving herself freedom to explore women's issues amongst African-Americans in Push, the all-female cast centralizes Push's main concepts - gender, incest, rape, racism - onto a singular, funneled identity. It serves to make the novel more easily digestible (i.e. more enjoyable for men who prefer not reading about "women's issues") as a whole. A more male viewpoint is given through Jermaine who, while a lamentingly underdeveloped character, stands out as a deviant amongst the cast appearance and personality-wise. Gender and ethnicity are two of the few aspects to Precious, her "black queen" self, which she can be unquestioningly proud of, while an ethnically-charged inferiority complex towards her intelligence guides much of Precious' other interactions with the rest of the world: Miz Rain, the principal, Mr. Wicher, her classmates. Sapphire tastefully captures the whirlwind reactions minorities may feel towards the majority like the author has experienced significant racial prejudice herself. I say tastefully, because Sapphire doesn't take the easy out and make her main character an Uncle Tom, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, a carbon copy of Louis Farrakhan's draconian politics, a follower. Precious is complex: while in the beginning doubt is integral to her character - awkward moments in Mr. Wicher's class, such as "his face is red, he is shaking, I back off, I have won, I /guess/" when she challenges the teacher - she begins to grow independence while in Each One Teach One. "I look at Miz Teacher's long, dreadlocky hair, look kinda nice but kinda nasty too," says Precious, initially with learned distaste until she quickly follows the statement up with the open-ended "I don't know how I feel about people with hair like that." In any one else such an unsure attitude would signal a lack of conviction or at worst, extreme flightiness, it's a much more meaningful action coming from Precious, to break away from her mother's coercive brainwashing, and a step in the right direction.

The queerest of the queer.

Boys in the girls room
Girls in the men's room
You free your mind in your androgyny
Boys in the parlor
They're getting harder
I'll free your mind and your androgyny

No sweeter a taste that you could find
Than fruit hanging ripe upon the vine
There's never been an oyster so divine
A river deep that never runs dry

The birds and bees they hum along
Like treasures they twinkle in the sun
Get on board and have some fun
Take what you need to turn you on

Behind closed doors and under stars
It doesn't matter where you are
Collecting jewels that catch your eye
Don't let a soul mate pass you by
Garbage - "Androgyny"

The 1980s was an androgynous renaissance: Annie Lennox rocked a crew cut better than most men on daytime MTV, enormous shoulder pads were in, the pageboy dominated, and a defiant Grace Jones blended gender mores to a distorted paste in mainstream films like Conan the Destroyer and A View To A Kill. Although published in 1996, Push is set during the 1980s, and infused with a strong relevance to the time period it lives through. Push is as a much a product of the era it swims in as it is a testament to the intolerance which overwhelmed 1980s popular culture.

Precious is unquestioningly the novel's main character, but what about her classmates at the alternative school? While one of my biggest gripes over Sapphire's novel is the stifling lack of detail given to characters other than Precious, Mama, and Miss Rain, this could have been done on purpose. Rita, Consuelo, Jermaine - these characters are all carbon outlines for the audience to fill in however they wish. However, with all of the classmates and their unique (if underdeveloped) personalities taken into consideration, it is Jermaine who I find the most interesting and substantial. Jermaine is first described by Precious as a "a girl my color in boy suit, look like some kinda butch." It's a minimal but evocative description. Perhaps intentionally, Sapphire's self-portrait on the back of the book's jacket was the first image that popped into my head here. Between the angular, squared-off haircut and jagged expression Sapphire even looks like a dead ringer for the aforementioned Grace Jones. I would not be surprised if Sapphire inserted herself the novel as a composite of both Miss Rain and Jermaine, using distinct parts of her personality to embody these two characters. It would certainly complement the duality-heavy characters found in all of the readings we have analyzed in our class so far. Each character represents two sides of the lesbian stereotype: the butch, male-aversive Jermaine - she responds with a blunt "good" when Consuelo makes the observation that there "ain' no guys in our class" - versus the "straight-acting" lipstick lesbian embodied by Blue Rain. However, Blue Rain is by no means a 'weak' character. For example, she has no problem reasoning against Precious' homophobia when the latter expresses her Louis Farrakhan-informed prejudice: "Miz Rain say Farrakhan is jive anti-Semitic, homophobic fool." Finally, Blue Rain attempts to even change Precious' attitudes through calm reasoning, a move that is somewhat successful thanks to Precious' respect for her teacher. "Ms Rain say homos not who rape, not homos who let me sit up not learn for sixteen years, not homos who sell crack fuck Harlem. It's true. Ms Rain the one who put the chalk in my hand, make me queen of the ABCs." Unlike the relatively foppish gay and lesbian characters portrayed throughout mainstream media, Sapphire's Blue Rain is confident, strong, and intensely passionate. She doesn't resort to meekly backing into a corner nor violence when her personality comes into question. Considering the rampant ignorance and prejudice surrounding the LBGT community during the early 1990s, when "Precious" was written, Miss Rain is a rare mainstream example of a positive lesbian role model.

Though the audience learns enough about Jermaine from the character herself, it is through Precious' observations on her classmate which sheds the most light on androgyny, sexuality, and mainstream attitudes towards the two controversial ideas, especially in relation to the novel's time period. In fact, Precious has a strong aversion to Jermaine from the beginning, when she moves away from the woman when her lesbianism is thrown out into the open because Precious "don't want no one getting the wrong idea about /me/. To Precious, lesbianism is "freaky deaky," and even though her and Jermaine are the same color, they are not (and might never be) on the same plane of existence: "We about the same color but I think thas all we got the same. I is /all/ girl. Don't know here." There is a sense of learned elitism Precious extols towards Jermaine solely due to the latter's sexuality and aesthetic; it's ironic considering Precious has an extreme inferiority complex as far as almost anything else is concerned, owing to her abusive upbringing. Sapphire, who is bisexual herself, uses Precious' ignorance allegorically to represent the prejudice deviant sexualities faced in the 80s . Likewise, this same ignorance is used by Sapphire to point out and criticize the discrimination African-Americans exhibit towards people of their own ethnicity. Sapphire even wishes she had a "light-skinned" boyfriend throughout the novel, indicating there are certain shades of all-inclusive prejudice directed /towards/ blacks, /from/ blacks. On an wider scale, Precious' attitudes are essentially a microcosm for the rest of the world's behavior towards the LBGT community.

An early insight into Jermaine's character comes through in Precious' observation over the androgynous character's name. "Jermaine, which I don't have to tell you is a /boy's/ name, say, "It's who you know and I know too many people in the Bronx baby." Names are an exceedingly important component to one's self-identity. Is Jermaine even her real name? Sapphire keeps this ambiguous. Ultimately the audience has no idea, because even Jermaine's story at the end of the book mentions nothing about how she was named. Furthermore, her full name is Jermaine Hicks. It's an ironic last name; I don't really need to point out why (Jermaine's distaste for "honkies", an integral part to her character, as she so often reminds the audience, plays a big part in the blackly humorous but subtle wordplay over her name), but let me just say that with a surname like that, I could certainly understand why she might have changed her first name.

Eros and Botany

Chapter 4 ends with a striking image of a house divided: a daughter and her father, engrossed in their personal paths, seen by the audience through two seperate windows. It's vivid imagery, not only from a symbolic point of view (windows alone are generally a pretty loaded symbol; just ask Hitchcock), but on a purely aesthetic perspective as well. We are seeing Bruce and Alison through unobfuscated windows to their personalities, and it's an allegory for Fun Home's concept. Bechdel's graphic novel is an intimate look into her relationship with with her father, albeit only viewed from inside her 'window', with illuminated insight into contrasts between the two characters. Since we are only given Bechdel's point of view, I feel like the novel is unfairly balanced towards her interpretation, biased; doubly so because Bruce is not alive to provide the audience with opinions to the contrary. This throws off the book's impact and validity somewhat. However, when Bechdel indulges moments of judgmentality and hypocrisy herself, the audience are (whether Alison realizes this or not) given a snapshot of her personality to clash against Bruce's. These differences in personality, whether perceived or actual on Bechdel's perspective, are blatantly illustrated during Alison's Easter memory with her father where the audience can see dynamics in motion. What she shows is pretty unflattering.

"At Easter, dad would paint goose eggs with twining tea roses," relates Alison, atonally misunderstanding, while her dad, eyebrows furrowed and expression even more stoic than usual, handpaints an enormous egg. The background, on the other hand, shows a disinterested, even aloof, Alison dipping /chicken/ eggs into a tiny paint vat. Dipping. Chicken eggs. Not goose eggs, not handpainting. She's depicting herself in an unflattering fashion: for a bookworm, Alison acts more conforming, less creative, and ultimately far less individualistic than she probably should be, especially in relation to her father. Dipping chicken eggs is considerably more impersonal, as well as rotely trivial, than handpainting a goose egg. While Alison says "if there ever was a bigger pansy than my father it was Marcel Proust," Bechdel is only talking about one aspect to the many aspects of her father. She's disregarding his other personality traits in favor of an easier target. I disagree with her opinion on Bruce, naturally. "I was just about to grab a beer, and then we'll get to work on the flagstones," says her dad, smiling coquettishly, to Roy. You know, maybe I just have no idea what a pansy really is, but considering how much beer Bruce guzzles throughout the story as well as how hard he works physically (the latter can not even be disputed by Alison who shows him working on some 'home improvement' project in numerous scenes), the word 'pansy' does not give us an accurate representation of her father's character. Additionally, what of her father's response when Alison's eyes fixate upon the masquiline-looking woman in the diner? "Is THAT what you want to look like?" he probes his daughter, words rolling off the tongue like a recoiled snake. For all his supposed pansiness, that sounds like a typical 'straight male' reaction to seeing a bulldyke, with all the repulsion and shallow judgmentality that comes along with it. What Alison totally disregards are her father's dualities. Bruce must balance both of his sexualities on a precarious, precipice-esque vantage point, manifesting itself in numerous personality traits which seem at odds with another. Drinking cheap beer versus reading Camus, and so on. It's part of his conflicted character. I don't want to say Bruce is androgynous, because he absolutely is not, but the principal is similar. His traits borrow equally from the masquiline and feminine sides of the spectrum. It's just a matter of which sides he decides to show at any given point in the story.

There's another dimension to Alison's use of the word 'pansy', however. Pansies are also a type of flower. Saying her father is a pansy is an enormous double entendre. "Eros and botany are pretty much the same thing," says Alison, which is an apt summary of Bruce's personality, dualities and all. Since Bruce can not express himself fully and truthfully in his life, he needs to semi-substitute (not completely as evidence by his various dalliances with teenagers) his deviant sexuality for botany, an acceptable alternative socially with a remarkable connection to each other. It reminds me of the infamous 'fucking flowers' scene from Pink Floyd's The Wall. Barely constrained sexuality and sensuality anthropomorphisized through flowers. Flowers are erotic enough on their own - when terms like budding and seeding are commonly applied to describe flowers you know there has to be something bubbling beneath the surface, but they are given an entirely new veneer in The Wall, which is pictured to the left. Stamen and pistil even /sound/, speechwise, like their anatomically human counterparts. Bruce's ideal is represented by the flowers in Pink Floyd's film.

However, though I feel like Alison is too damning towards her father, I do not think her judgmentality is not without merit. Living with such an outwardly emotionless person, especially one who was so unpredictable and occasionally physically abusive, will change one's impression of everything around them. In essence, Bechdel's personality is justifiable to some degree. The hypocrisy and judging nature are like a defense mechanism. Just look at the scene where Alison brings her rough-looking lesbian friends to Chumley's - she's judged immediately and shallowly, as her own father did to the bulldyke in the diner. It was a man's world in the sixties. It's a man's world even now. Though Alison says "the vision of the bulldyke sustained me," going through life as a woman, a lesbian, and a daughter in her family has colored her perceptions, increased her weariness despite, I'm assuming, the strong person she is on the inside.It's hard to blame Alison for her occasionally unfair impressions of others when she has been subjected to an abundance of unfair impressions herself.

Scaly Flowers

Bechdel is a talented writer, a talented artist, and if her looking too deeply into her father's death is any indication, she'd make a pretty ace conspiracy theorist, too.

It's great Alison is interested in getting to intimately know the details behind her father's death, especially considering the rest of her family doesn't seem to care how or why Bruce really died. Likewise, the thoughts going through Bruce's head those weeks before he passed is an even more esoteric component to her father Alison does not overlook. These are all oft-neglected, but important pieces of information the rest of her family, whether through preoccupation with grief, apathy, or simply not caring enough, do not zero in. According to the truck driver who hit him, Bruce "jumped backwards into the road as if he saw a snake" when the truck neared the pre-occupied dad. In addition to the snickering phallic reference behind the snake (if anything could get her father to 'jump' it'd be a penis, right? Even his supposed way of dying involved his homosexuality literally creeping up on him) mention, Who else actively pursues the truth beyond the eyes of a truck driver? Only Bechdel, at least to our knowledge. What isn't great, however, is Bechdel's presumptuous idea that she had something to do with Bruce's passing. This is the kind of thinking I'd expect out of an adored, only child trust fund baby; not someone with two equally neglected brothers. "For a wild moment I entertained the idea that my father had timed his death with this (Bechdel coming out) in mind, as some sort of deranged tribute. But that would only confirm that his death was not my fault. That, in fact, it had nothing to do with me at all. And I'm reluctant to let go of that last tenuous bond," muses Bechdel, self-determinedly, towards the end of chapter three. Well, at least she's honest. She knows she's reaching pretty far in her theories, as well as admitting that part of her presumptuousness stems simply from wishful thinking on her part. Since their father-daughter relationship was not strong in life, who says they can't become closer through death? Bechdel certainly doesn't. However, Bechdel this is all cyclical. Like I mentioned at the start, I still feel like Alison has already decided in her mind . She so desperately wants Bruce's death to have involved her in some way that she's willing to jump to unfortunate conclusions. This narrow tunnel thinking is as dangerous as the 'snake,' the metaphorical and literal one, who supposedly sent Bruce to his grave.

Speaking of snakes and more phallic symbols, Bechdel drops a hidden reference to not only the male organ, but pedophilia (or at the very least toleration for a naked child's form) and its relation to the phallus halfway through the chapter. The reference is highly fitting considering both Bruce's homosexuality and sexual relationships with boys. Bechdel knows how to chose her pop culture references well. However, the reference is one only rock n' roll history geeks would probably pick up on without researching the band. "I got the Blind Faith album," announces a working mode Bruce - is that a smile toying with his lips for once? - on the front porch to his children and babysitter, although his attention towards Roy during this scene is obvious and barely constrained. He lives through teenaged boys by proxy - or vicariously, as you described during our class discussion today. His kids might as well not even be in the same scene. You know how children love winning their parents approval? Imagine Bruce as the child, and Roy as the parent. Call me judgmental, but I just can't see Bruce enjoying Blind Faith behind the provocative album cover's "artistic" value. Though Blind Faith is musically well-known for including guitarist Eric Clapton and having a few minor hits in the UK and the US (again because of Clapton's presence), their fame extends mostly to the album cover of their only proper record. It'd be controversial today, if not even more so: a topless, redheaded twelve year old girl holding a toy airplane. The young girl, the daughter of friends' of the band, was given explicit permission by her parents to appear topless in the photograph. The band was attacked as "assaulters on common decency" almost immediately after their self-titled album was released, with some record shops refusing to sell the record, and an alternate cover was issued for stores who wouldn't stock the original artwork. The plane the girl held, in particular, was attacked as an obvious phallic symbol, which Either way, I feel like Bechdel's inclusion of the Blind Faith album isn't coincidental. She clearly chose to showcase the album as an allegory for not only her father's phallic concerns, but his homoerotic, pedarasty-esque fascination with boys, as well. The only difference is that the album cover is far removed from real life, especially since it is (in my opinion) inexplicit other than showing undeveloped breasts in addition to the girl sporting a (most likely ironic or signs-of-the-times-like) spaced-out expression on her face, while Bruce's attraction to boys is like steam. Expose him to an attractive boy and watch Bruce's inner conflicts play out through his tormented facial expressions. Blind Faith's girl has no such concerns.

Bruce's sexuality has been well-developed for years while the girl shown on Blind Faith's album cover is undeveloped, 'budding', much like the "silk flowers, glass flowers, needlepoint flowers, flower paintings, and where any of these failed to materialize, floral patterns" in the Bechdel home. The word I homed on in specifically was needlepoint - a /needle/point flower is like a double dose of phallic symbols thrown together. Although they are sometimes cheap plot devices, phallic symbols can be, and are in Fun Home, an effective method of showing how Bruce copes with his sexuality: through proxies. Through expression. Through creativity. "What kind of a man but a sissy could possibly love flowers this ardently?" disagrees Bechdel.

A repressed one, I answer.

Mind-Numbing Phallacy

Chapter Two opens up with a loaded illustration: a grassy knoll with a human silhouette standing over Bruce's gravestone. It's an image Bechdel created to bluntly diffuse her emotions onto the reader. It's immediate. And then there's that obelisk leering over the grave from its vantage point in the background. It's tall. It's proud. It's strong. It's obfuscating. It's mind-numbingly phallic.

Could Bechdel have been any more obvious about her father's fascination with the male organ? I almost immediately caught on to what the majority of chapter 2 was going to be about - just by looking at the opening illustration for three seconds. I don't know. Maybe I just have my mind the gutter, or it's my own predilections talking, but at least Bechdel presented the potentially crass subject matter in an insightful, humorous fashion. For example, when Bechdel's "mom couldn't convince the monument maker to do it" - that is, create Bruce's obelisk out of "fleshy, translucent marble like the tombstones in the old part of the cemetary" - I snickered pretty hard. What else is abundantly fleshy and occasionally translucent? Not that I'm an expert on the subject, but I'd bet 'fleshy' rivals 'thick' or 'pendulous' for most used adjectives to artfully describe penises in erotica novels. Only the daughter of a phallus-obsessed closeted gay man would use the words 'fleshy' and 'translucent' to describe a tombstone, however. That's not to say it isn't a vivid description, because it is, and Bechdel manages to pull it off without sounding ridiculous, but the connections she's trying to draw between a tombstone and a penis is a little too obvious for my liking. Either way, regardless of Bechdel's surprising lack of subtlety here, there's a lot to be said about Bruce and his connection to various phallic symbols in his life, "a shape in life he was unabashedly fixated on."

Months ago I discovered a religion on Wikipedia called the Church of Priapus. The connections to Greek myth and philosophy Bechdel throws into Fun Home continue here. Named after Priapus, the constantly-erect Greek god of fertility and the male sexual organ, it's a religion predominantly associated with gay men. Bruce would've probably fit in perfectly the St. Priapus Church. According to Bruce, the obelisk "symbolizes life." The Church of Priapus feels the same way. An article from The Advocate says the Church believes the phallus is the source of life, beauty, joy, and pleasure, and is wholly deserving of worship and awe for these reasons. I'm curious to know if Bechdel knows about the Church of Priapus, or if Bruce knew of the church, or was even apart to it - it's an interesting idea to consider. Between Priapus, Daedalus, Icarus, and Sisyphus, Bechdel's incorporation of Greek pantheism into her story is extensive, but accessible and full of allusions and depth which would not be possible without the connections she draws with, for example, Daedalus and Bruce. Her love of mythology deepens our understanding of her perspective regarding Bruce and his death. Bechdel, as shown by the panel of her crying on her girlfriend Joan's shoulder but not really saying anything, would not be able to express her true feelings through raw emotional displays - not without a rationalized veil, like that provided by the linearly written details of Greek myth, to coat them in and act as a sieve. Rationalizing things is something Bechdel has, perhaps even needs, in spades.

Greek myth isn't the only tool Bechdel uses to deepen our understanding, however. She also extends this to literature and pop culture. "Should we have been suspicious when he started plowing through Proust the year before?" says Bechdel. Instead of focusing on the obvious black humor involved in "people reaching middle-age the day they realize they're not going to finish Remembrance of Things Past," a notoriously lengthy work, I homed in on author Proust himself. Like Bruce, Marcel Proust was a closeted homosexual to all but his closest friends. The extent to which Proust exercised his sexuality is unknown beyond unverified accounts, and aside from using homosexual characters in several pieces, Proust never made any known open comments regarding homosexuality - whether his own sexuality, his affairs, nor the affairs of others. In other words, Proust is remarkably similar to Bruce, at least on a superficial level. Neither acknowledged their homosexuality to anyone other than themselves and close friends, although we have no idea why both men chose to do so. We can speculate, however - was Proust just as self-loathing as Bruce is thought to be? His gay characters are remarkably realistic and under stereotyped, especially considering the time they were written, so this doesn't seem like a likely explanation to me. The readers are, with good reason, left totally on the dark here. We're forced to speculate and draw comparisons; Bechdel is encouraging us to think non-linearly. It's not at all like Bruce's noticeably changed appearance on his death bed, for example, which smacks the audience upside the head with its bluntness. "His wiry hair, which he had daily taken great pains to style, was brushed straight upon end to reveal a surprisingly receded hairline," notes Bechdel upon seeing her father's corpse, 'prepared' by a mortician unrelated to the family. Bruce is far more similar than he appears to the previously mentioned "unattractive balding men" Danny DeVito and James Gandolfini from my last blog entry. Beginning his sexual life as a strapping college-aged young man in the military with a full head of hair, he died a balding, hairy middle-aged man who was having affairs with boys. Poetic justice at its cruelest, the loss of Bruce's hair signifies both a loss of attractiveness - certainly of his own self-image and most likely the impression of others - and the death of his sexual existence. Afterall, the frequently namechecked Robert Redford never did lose his hair like Bruce did. Not even death can hide Bruce's lies.

Wax On, Wax Off

Gay men aren't supposed to be hairy...are they?

From the opening airplane scene, something hit me before any of the words did: Alison's father is one hairy man. Springy and dense, it coats Bruce's arms like a poison. I feel like Bechdel even emphasizes her father's hirsuteness in certain frames, such as the numerous shots of a shirtless Bruce or a reclining Bruce in bed, to make him look more like a neanderthal than a father. It's all part of Bruce's dualities. His distant attitudes towards his family, his hairiness embodied, juxtaposed against his love of fashion, aesthetics, and art, his delicate facets. Alison certainly doesn't view her father as a paragon of warmth, and his hairiness reflects this attitude which is surprisingly prevalent even outside the Bechdel home. Beyond the gay bear culture, hairy men - especially in the 2000s pop culture rift - are generally stereotyped as slobs, simpletons, sleazeballs, "funny men" (but never as desirable men), or just all-around unattractive male figures. I mean, look at Robin Williams, The Diceman, Steve Carell, Danny Devito, and James Gandolfini. These actors all make a living playing characters fulfilling at least one of these personality traits, and in the case of Gandolfini and Devito, even have the unfortunate double whammy of being balding and overweight in addition to furry. How many children grow up wanting to look like them? Unfortunately, while Gandolfini is an exceedingly talented actor, he probably isn't an object of lust to "average" people. Though Bruce might have been as hairy as he is depicted in the graphic novel, I think it's primarily Alison taking artistic license with her character, albeit in a subtle and wholly relevant way (just look at the gay subtext involved in Bruce's hairiness alone - bears vs. twinks, hairy vs. waxed, it's a common topic within the LBGT community). Bechdel sets up her novel with these dualities, and it's a frequently visited theme, these contrasts, in just the first chapter alone.

Alison wastes no time in describing her father as "libidinal, manic, martyred," for example. In addition to the libidinal portion foreshadowing his sexual dalliances with students and the nanny, each word Alison uses to describe Bruce appeal to an entirely different portion of his personality. These dualities have been a common theme in everything we've read thus far. What I really latched onto was the word 'libidinal,' however. For someone who looks like a conservative blowhard, it's hard to imagine him sleeping around, at least in my mind. And then we are even presented with the dualities between Alison and her father, as well as their relationship and, in my opinion, Alison's hypocrisy. She criticizes her father for being emotionless and cold when she even describes herself as the "spartan to his Greek" in comparison to her father. "This is the wallpaper for my room? But I hate pink! I hate flowers!" exclaims Alison, as the comic depicts her eyes sinking to the back of her skull - in tandem with her heart, most likely. "Tough titty" is the only reaction Alison provokes from her father. "What's the point of making something so hard to dust?" questions Alison while buffering a citadel-shaped chair (note the irony: the top of the chair has three crosses on the top, and I don't it has something to do with anything as lightweight or as obvious as the fact that the next scene shows the Bechdel family in church). "It's beautiful," replies her father, stoic-faced as usual. Does her father have more than one facial expression? It doesn't look like it. His face doesn't even change after Alison, "having little practice with the gesture" of kissing, "grabs his hand and busses the knuckles lightly as if he were a bishop or an elegant lady." In fact, Alison's father is both of these things. A bishop and an elegant lady. His coldness is nearly clerical, and his interests, his "designer cologne," his caring "if the necklines don't match," are like a debutante's. The religious undertones in the chair Alison was polishing is bizarrely indicative of her relationship with her father, as well. Though her father is strong and rigid like the chair is, appearance-wise, he needs Alison - other people, his male students, the nanny, even his wife - to maintain these appearances. He needs to be cared for. He needs to be polished himself. He's really like a child inside. His self-loathing, too, is even dependent upon the attitudes of other people in their relation to himself. The father's children and wife keep up the image that he Like Alison alludes to, everything falls into place like an elaborate jigsaw. Not even the church has a more difficult to understand hierarchy. Speaking of religion, religious themes seem to pop up throughout the book, but perhaps the most prevalent involves Bechdel's incorporation of classical myth into her story.

The Daedalus and Icarus myth is featured prominently in the first chapter when Bechdel describes the relationship between her and her father. "Then there are those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design of failure?" Icarus is an overdone myth to namecheck in art at this point, but it isn't here where Bechdel applies a totally unique spin to one of the most famous pieces in the Metamorphosis. She approaches seemingly overdone topics like gender issues as if no one had ever tackled them before her. When both were prepared for flight, Daedalus "warned Icarus not to fly too high, because the heat of the sun would melt the wax, nor too low, because the sea foam would soak the feathers." Whether intentionally or not, Ovid's piece on Daedalus and Icarus is easily broken apart by deconstructive literary theory, because what Ovid doesn't mention through Daedalus' speech is the most important part of the myth when parallel to Fun Home. It's Icarus, of course. Daedalus doesn't want Icarus to fly too high, for the sun would melt the /wings/, nor to fly too low, as the water would soak the /feathers/. What about Icarus himself? If the sun could melt a pair of wings imagine what it could do to supple human flesh. Likewise, don't pores soak water the same way feathers do? However, Daedalus doesn't mention anything about Icarus when he's actually warning his son. The wings are Daedalus' only concern. The artifice themselves; /his/ artifice, not the artificee. That's not to say Daedalus doesn't care about his son (for all we know their relationship could be a whole lot more complicated than what is presented by Ovid, and it most likely is considering Daedalus' reaction to Icarus' death), but deconstructionist theory is all about what isn't shown rather than what is, and what isn't shown is any indication that Daedalus recognizes his son beyond the created wings strapped to his back.

Late Bloomer

We go from Patria's flamboyants to Dede's dark flowers in the span of only a few chapters. "When Dede next notices, the garden's stillness is deepening, blooming dark flowers, their scent stronger for the lack of color and light." A cursory look at the chapter's opening line might make the audience think something awful is going to happen soon, but I don't see these images that way at all. For one, these dark flowers are "blooming" - just beginning their lives as beautiful flowers - and secondly, Alvarez specifically mentions their "scent is stronger for the lack of color and light." Dede's moroseness has strengthened her character, perhaps even to the point of extreme bullheadedness, and the state of these flowers are entirely indicative of Dede's personality. Although a morose, resigned-acting character (hence the flowers dark colors), Alvarez is suggesting Dede is a late bloomer; unlike her sisters, whose defiant personalities were known even as children, Dede seems to be realizing the importance of uniqueness later on in life. It could even be argued that Dede's generally conformist attitudes are helping her remove herself from traditionalism - reflecting upon her sisters seems to inflate her with a vague sense of importance, as well as encouraging her to question why she didn't go along with Minerva, Patria, and Mate originally. Of course, there are still barriers for Dede to overcome, and whether she's able to break away from the traditional opinions women hold about themselves and are subjected to by others in the Dominican Republic is still up in the air. Afterall, Dede's "scent is stronger for the lack of color and light" - years of submissiveness have only made her more submissive and docile.

Her sexuality is particularly interesting, and sexuality as a theme complements the metaphor of a flower blooming in an overdone but blunt fashion. Alvarez wants us to take notice of Dede's dismal sex life. Though Alvarez approaches sexuality tastefully and subtly, it's still a focal point of each Mirabal sister. Dede is no different. "But in so many other things I have not changed, Dede thinks. Last year during her prize trip to Spain, the smart-looking Canadian man approached her, and though it'd been ten years already since the divorce, Dede just couldn't give herself that little fling." Proving herself to be much less Blanche Deveraux of "The Golden Girls" fame and more Mrs. Doubtfire, Dede's traditional views (and perhaps even more) prevent her from enjoying time with a man other than her former husband. It wouldn't be too far off point to say Dede is definitely the least sexually awakened character in the entire novel. On another note, you may call it a dirty mind talking, or me just looking too deeply into things, but Dede would have happened to be around 69 years old around the time this "smart-looking Canadian man" approached her. This is just another (most likely coincidental) facet to consider when looking at Dede's sexuality.

Dede is also being held back through close-mindedness. For example, Dede assumes her niece is uninterested and even annoyed at the idea of talking to the journalist about her mother. "Dede cringed. She had better cut this off. Unlike their aunt, the children won't put up with this kind of overdone gush." That's awfully presumptuous on the part of Dede, as well as clearly untrue. Dede seems to be the one imprinting her dislike of "overdone" gush onto Minou. "But Minou is chuckling away. "Come see us again," she offers, and Dede, forced to rise to this politeness, adds, "Yes, now you know the way." Whether through obligation or feeling guilty for assuming Minou's feelings, Alvarez's structurally rich writing lets us know Dede feels /something/, a hint that she is a deeper character than her passive personality might originally suggest.

Dede's husband is a constant influence on her mind even after their lives have gone in seperate directions. "It was as if the three fates were approaching, their scissors poised to snip the knot that was keeping Dede's life from falling apart." Alvarez's imagery has dual-meanings here. Although using the Three Fates from Greek mythology is nothing new in literature, especially where four sisters are concerned, the word 'knot' was chosen deliberately. Knowing how marriage-conscious the "docile middle child, used to following the lead" is, knot is an incredibly loaded word for Dede to use in a first-person narrative. The knot Dede refers to here strongly alludes to her marriage with Jamaito. While Dede wishes "a long look as if she could draw the young man of her dreams out from the bossy, old-fashioned macho he'd become" could change her husband, she's forced to deal with a progressively less understanding husband. Regardless, Dede's marriage, even if she does not see the marriage itself as idyllic, is seen as an anchor for the young woman - it's the only object in her preventing her from going along with whatever her sisters are doing. She'd be just as likely to follow along with whatever her sisters are doing if Jamaito, a strong male figure, was not in her life. That's just part of Dede's personality, submitting to people with loud presence or the ability to lead, a trait Dede lacks completely. I find it somewhat ironic that while Jamaito used to be the "young man of her (Dede's) dreams" - presumably, a gentle, passive young man - and Dede longs for the older Jamaito, Dede has gotten through life by conforming and submitting, not by complementing or sharing equally. Passiveness and submissiveness rarely complement each other well. Since Dede has a more submissive personality, Jamaito adapted over time to this, and strengthened Dede's docile streak. Machismo in Latin culture is commonplace, even encouraged, but unlike the Mirabal sister's parents, where the father was obviously the 'king of his domain' and the mother the equally obvious 'power behind the throne,' (also not all that uncommon in Latino marriages) the marriage between Dede and Jamaito lacks dynamics. Mr. and Mrs. Mirabal, for all of their differences, were a complementary couple. There is nothing symbiotic about Dede's relationship; it's one-sided and shallow, especially as the couple approaches middle-age. However, Alvarez places some of the blame - as well as a bit of quiet contempt - onto Dede for allowing herself be so compliant in her marriage. As much as Alvarez is writing In The Time of The Butterflies as a means of eulogizing and paying tribute to the sisters' deeds and positive traits, I feel like Alvarez is writing to point out that although the Mirabal sisters are wholly deserving of their status, they aren't inhuman or infallible. Just look at previous chapters, where Alvarez describes Mate's superficiality or Padria's religious and sexual complications. Celebrity may blind people to the truth behind the legend, but Alvarez does not shy away from depicting any of the characters' perceived flaws. It is Alvarez's duty as a journalist to present the truth as she sees it. It isn't her job to obsfucate. The characters in In The Time of The Butterflies are depicted as conflicted, and this is why Alvarez's writing is so effecting. For example, while "Dede had been ready to risk her life" that night the sisters drove along that "lonely road," Dede had her marriage to consider. Her marriage is essentially the only reason why she's still alive, and although Dede could have died a martyr alongside her sisters, it is martyrdom and the associated satisfaction but the thought of leaving her husband alone stacked against life, an unsatisfying marriage, and keeping the family together. Conflict at its most raw. Not even Dede in her 'old age' seems to know which decision would have been the most appropriate for her to choose.