chabot@miles.DEC (All God's chillun got guns) (08/30/85)
Tom Long > 1. The protagonist is a failure in life, and for a good reason. She is > too self-centered to maintain a real friendship, much less a marriage. Mira is not the only self-centered person; many of the people in the book are self-centered. Consider her husband--he won't let her drive, he never notices that sex isn't fulfilling for her (in fact, even though he's a doctor he spouts some nonsense about it being bad if he doesn't have an orgasm after being aroused), he has an extra-marital affair (which she does not), he doesn't help care for the babies. You can't call him not-self-centered. > 2. In her bitterness, she uses her intelligence to lash out at everyone > around her. In the 25 years covered by the book she goes from being a > lonely, maladjusted teenager to being a lonely, maladjusted professor -- > without having gained a bit of wisdom along the way. No, you missed the wisdom she gained. The book starts with wisdom--the part about how she is hiding in the women's room at Harvard, coming to terms with the fact that no one notices her carefully groomed exterior, and her dress and makeup and hairstyle has taken a lot of effort and is important, and nobody sees it, and since there's really not much inside either, then she's really not there. *********************SPOILER WARNING*************************************** Mira goes through many changes. As a college student she discovers that her male peers don't treat her as an equal, and in fact they believe that her sexuality can be owned. The near gang-rape frightens her and she decides to retreat into conventionality. Perhaps her childhood didn't properly prepare her for life as a conventional housewife, or perhaps it did--why in the world should Mira be blamed any more than her husband for the divorce?! And what about her friends--how many of them went crazy--are they alone to blame for the depressions close to suicide?! Harvard, especially the beginning, was an exhiliarating part of the book for me--this was were Mira belonged, and felt right. She and her lover parted, but this was practically doomed from the start--they had very different environmental needs (how much research could she do in Africa?); but it didn't make their time together bad. The knowledge she gains of herself and her needs enables her for the first time to be able to communicate with her sons--this is good! And then she goes on a fellowship to Europe--how absolutely wonderful. She is alone on the Maine beach with all those snail shells, but she and the old man are gruff to each other and respect each other's gruffness without rancor. And what is wrong with a woman being alone? *********************end of spoiler****************************************** > 3. She blames men for all her problems. I have a male friend who suffers > from the same personality defects, and his life is as unsuccessful as hers. > But he doesn't suffer from the delusion that society is a conspiracy of > males out to keep him down. This is an oversimplification of the Mira. She doesn't blame men for all her problems--most of her problems she blames on her own naivete, and a lot on the way the world works: what could be more broken than the waste of an intelligent mind to clean a large house in the suburbs? or the waste of an intelligent mind in being yoked to subservience to a boyfriend's or husband's mind? Mira got her degree and has a professorship. This is failure? Holy cow, what does this make me?! Not everybody is cut out for coupleship and lots of babies, and those who do it for awhile don't necessarily do it forever. This doesn't make them failures. > 4. She supposes when a man goes to work, everything is easy for him. This > is nonsense; the individual man is no more responsible for society than > the individual woman is. But they get to go to work. She didn't get to go to work, so she didn't have any idea about what it was like. Neither did her husband have any idea about what it was like to be a housewife. > 5. Women do have one option not available to most men; they can become > housewives. Our protagonist was happy for a while being a housewife, but > since she didn't like her husband and she didn't like housework and her > best friend (!) told the neighbor women that our protagonist was having an > affair with the husband of one of them, her happiness was pretty fragile. > So she took out her frustrations by drinking and kind of ignoring her > children. Men can become househusbands. Mira was really quite miserable as a housewife--the only good thing were the babies and the time to do a lot of reading. But babies are A LOT of WORK. Sitting at home and reading is STERILE. Husbands tried to overrule their wives mutual friendships. Mira didn't ignore her children, but because she was denying herself in servitude to her husband and her sons (I mean, these people didn't have the sense to straighten up the bathroom after themselves), what did she have to communicate? If the best friend, a woman, is spreading such lies about Mira's infidelity, and Mira knows it, how can you say that Mira only blames men for all her troubles?! > Do women really take the ideas in a book like this one seriously? If I > wanted to find out about the world from reading a book, I would choose an > author or protagonist who had been successful in dealing with the world. > Do happy, normal women respond differently to "The Women's Room" than I do? This book drove me bananas, because I couldn't not stand to see the fairy tale princess get destroyed. Mira was successful. Okay, maybe she didn't get carried across the threshold and live happily ever-after (if you want to read books like this, try Harlequin--there the heroines surmount a variety of little troubles but are successful, and yes, some even deal with jealousy after marriage), but then not everyone does or wants to: this isn't the only realm of success. If you only read books about people who succeed, how will you know how to mark the pitfalls in life, and how will you know what happens if you fall? L S Chabot ...decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-amber!chabot