It's hard out here for a lady, too.
Now it's serious. Despite the fact that two babies have popped out of my belly (to borrow OlderKid's tasteful phrasing), I may not be a woman between the ages of 20 and 40. Or so according to this recent essay in Salon on a certain famous book by Judy Blume.
If you're an American woman between the ages of 20 and 40, the following passage will likely be familiar to you:
"I locked the bathroom door and attached a Teenage Softie to the little hooks on my pink belt. Then I got dressed and looked at myself in the mirror. Would anyone know my secret? Would it show? Would Moose, for instance, know if I went back outside to talk to him? Would my father know it right away when he came home for dinner? I had to call Nancy and Gretchen and Janie right away. Poor Janie! She'd be the last of the PTS's to get it. And I'd been so sure it would be me! How about that! Now I am growing for sure. Now I am almost a woman!
"Are you still there God? It's me, Margaret. I know you're there God. I know you wouldn't have missed this for anything! Thank you God. Thanks an awful lot…"
To the author's dismay, that passage now begins as follows:
"I locked the bathroom door and peeled the paper off the bottom of the pad. I pressed the sticky strip against my underpants. Then I got dressed and looked at myself in the mirror..."
Let me tell you straight. It's not just that I've never read a book by Judy Blume. What's worse, it's that I think I might have read one, but it had so little impact on me in any way that I can't remember one thing about it, let alone treasure the memory of that act of reading as my true initiation into American girl/womanhood. Since I don't think the book was AYTGIMM, (and even if it was), I was largely unmoved by the change.
Yet apparently the revision caused concern in the blogosphere. Some approved of the revision as helpful to contemporary girls confused and horrified by the antiquated concept of "sanitary belts," others deplored the mutilation of a classic historical document. Rebecca Traister of Salon falls into the latter category, comparing the belt to Laura Ingalls's corncob doll or Jane Eyre's sketch of her beautiful rival Blanche Ingram (yeah, that made no sense to me either) as a mark of historical difference which paradoxically helps reinforce the continuity of puberty and its many travails.
What's going on here is the classic "literature as instruction manual" versus "literature as inspiration" debate, of course, and while I'm pretty squarely in the latter camp, I'm not bringing out the big guns on this one. First of all, Blume is just a plain terrible writer, and so may not even qualify as literature at all. Second, why do so many defenses of this book begin "Even though I wasn't as excited as Margaret to start menstruating..."? If you have to make that disclaimer, why are you hitching your wagon of femininity to that narrowly-defined star? How about championing some literature that lets you incorporate some of that frustration and ambivalence about what America understands as "becoming a woman"? Heck, even Elizabeth Gaskell, whose Victorian classic Wives and Daughters I'm reading right now, spends as much time challenging those titular categories as she does affirming them. I'd say more about this but half of you fell asleep right after you saw the words "Victorian classic."
So what about it? What's the big deal that I'm missing? (And those who care to link the themes of this entry with the fact that my mother called me last night to tell me in minute detail of her dream that I had adopted a baby girl, going on for more than 15 minutes about how I held the girl, then she held the girl, then we put her in a dress, etc., etc. are welcome to arm-chair psychologize away.)
posted by Zil @ 9:09 AM
4 Comments:
Zil,
Didn't your mother always once claim that only-child boys "grow up strange"? She may be strictly operating in her own best-interests as a grandma.
In any case, I am apparently "An American Woman between 20 and 40," because I did read that book (digressive note: this whole concept of "american woman" being defined by the reading of judy blume makes me vow, again, to read Susan Choi). But I never understood the big deal. I think the only thing I "related to" was that weird feeling of conspiracy, love, and jealously among teenaged girls, who might as soon be your friend as your enemy (here cue the sad music as I tell of my fall from grace in the 7th grade, when, overnight it seemed, my ersatz friends disappeared: one minute we were stealing lipstick from the local 5-and-dime (yes I grew up in the 50s), the next they were mocking me from across the volleyball court.)
Anyways, I find the idea of revision strange, but only because the article says that it was changed because no one understand what a belt was. As you point out, that turns literature into a kind of instruction manual. And it's not as if those of us reading in the 80s knew what a belt was, but you can FRACKING FIGURE IT OUT FROM CONTEXT. jeesh. I also didn't know what a "barouche" was when I read Austen, and I'm not sure I knew what wisteria was when I read Absalom, Absalom. No, I did not just compare Blume to Austen and Faulkner?! I seem to have run into the great "what is literature" debate? But if all bad writers were excluded from the category of literature....where would we be?
The only other thing I remember from some Blume book: a disturbing perfume-application scene. You American Women know what I'm talking about.
Give me Stranger with My Face any day over this. Talk about ambivalence! The pains of the teenage years are made literal as the main character is doubled (yes, she has an evil twin!). I'm sure my mother wondered many a time if I had an evil twin who took over my body at night, turning me mean, hateful, and overly concerned with popularity.
I think I digress.
Let me be clear here, I'm not trying to impress with my superior pre-teen literary taste when I say I didn't care for JB. In fact, the book I do remember reading at that age, which conjures up some of the same feelings I guess AYTGIMM does for others is Marion Zimmer Bradley's Thendara House, about a guild of Free Amazon women on a distant planet who struggled with, among other things, Terran misogynists, divorce, lesbianism, and riding a horse while 9 months pregnant. (That last one really impressed me back then, for some reason). So I think the lesson here is, I am a big dork.
Asalad--
I love that Stranger with my Face is in your collection; i had no idea. I wonder if love of Lois turns out to be a prereq for grad school? When I was in the hospital, a certain grad school friend, who will probably be running the supreme court one day, brought me it to read in recovery. It was a perfect, yet odd, gift. I think I cried, but that could have been the vicodin. When I first read it, for weeks afterwards I tried to astral project when I went to sleep. And isn't there a creepy Lois Duncan involving a boarding school for girls? I'm starting to wonder if I should be (re)reading YA novels now. Also, were you a fan of The Westinghouse Game? That's another classic for me.
I can't wait to read your stories, and now I am ever more excited about the tribute to Lois. Can't you put me on your galleys' list?
I grew up in South Africa and as a male discovered that girls wore bras and had periods. I rember a friend who had her period just before her twelth birthday. In those days before adhesive pads she used a pantie with two hooks and a plastic crotch.To this day I have never been able to work out how you wore the belt with the pad attached. Am I the only male who reads this?
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home