Monday, July 27, 2009

Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

It was more than just the title that made me want to read Susan Jane Gilman's Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, but for a while I couldn't remember who recommended it or where I first saw it. Why was it in my to-be-read pile, and how long had it been there? Finally I remembered that I'd read about it in June (2009) when it appeared on Kim's list of favorites.

Gilman is similarly hard to place, in terms of generation. Most of this memoir made me think she was a baby boomer, born in the 1950's. But she says her parents were hippies and that she was four years old in 1968. That makes her seem a bit young to say that she was "born just as the women's movement was catching fire" and a bit old for a childish ambition to be "an actress, a model, and a stewardess." And amusing as the title image is, it seems completely ridiculous to me that anyone born after all the episodes of I Love Lucy had already aired would believe that "a twenty-first century feminist" had to wear anything in particular--or forswear an entire category of clothing-- to keep her membership in the feminist club. Since this memoir is deeply rooted in New York City, perhaps it's that first-wave feminists there had a more stringent and longer-lasting dress code than the rest of the country? In the climactic title moment of the book, trying on a pouffy wedding dress, Gilman discovers third wave feminism:

"Why did it take so long to have this experience? Every woman should have this experience--and not only if or when she gets married. Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking, in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow-minded culture."

Yes, I'd like to know, too--why did it take you so long to have this experience? And why, in the post-1960's-free-love era, did you and your teenaged friends think that losing your virginity would make you "glamorous creatures"? How could it have taken you until your second year of college to realize that many of the people in NYC "saw themselves as characters" while truckers in places like Jarratt, Virginia "were of an entirely different ilk"?

And yet I couldn't completely hate this book. Gilman does have a way with words. I laughed out loud at the part where she describes trying to speak French and ending up "like the French-speaking equivalent of Latka Gravas on Taxi" (largely because my husband and daughter recently described my attempts to pronounce French words as like the double-voweled pronounciation of my son's Serbian chess teacher speaking English).

Also Gilman's story of a Thanksgiving dinner at Howard Johnson's when she was a kid is entertainingly told, and relates to the recent discussion here about the "truth" of memory:

"And so we inscribed it in our annals of the family: The best Thanksgiving ever. Occasionally, as teenagers, John and I prompted, 'Hey, remember that Thanksgiving we spent at Howard Johnson's?' Then we'd lovingly recall each detail, reliving our pleasure, our naive delight at the voluptuousness of it all....
Only years later, when we were waxing nostalgic about it again one morning, did our father audibly groan: 'Augh. That Thanksgiving we spent at Howard Johnson's. Was that ever a fucking nightmare.'
'Oh, it was horrible,' our mother agreed. 'The absolute worst.'"

When they find out their parents are getting divorced, Gilman and her brother overlay another version of "truth" on the memory:

"After our parents separated, John and I had the awful, nagging suspicion that...our entire home life had been like Thanksgiving at Howard Johnson's. Had we spent our childhood dancing around with ice buckets on our heads, thinking everything was just dandy, when really our parents were sitting there spellbound with misery? Apparently so."

So while I'm not going to run right out and buy the new book Gilman has just published (Undress Me In The Temple of Heaven, reviewed at A Bookworm's World), I might flip through it if I see it in the library. First I'm going to have to get all my friends and neighbors to vote for the library levy this fall--it's been a long dry spell at my local library--no new books. Looking at the shelves of "new" books there has been as disconcerting as trying to place Gilman in terms of one generation or another.

Do any of you identify with a generation? I never did until I heard of Generation Jones.

18 comments:

Alison said...

"And amusing as the title image is, it seems completely ridiculous to me that anyone born after all the episodes of I Love Lucy had already aired would believe that "a twenty-first century feminist" had to wear anything in particular--or forswear an entire category of clothing-- to keep her membership in the feminist club."

You'd be amazed. Actual conversation, from the 1990s, between a woman and her 4-year-old daughter:

"Honey, let's put on your overalls."
"I don't WANT to wear overalls!"
"You look so cute in your overalls, though!"
"I don't want to - I want my pink dress!"
"But honey, feminists wear overalls."
"Feminists wear whatever they want, and I want to wear my pink dress!!!"

I'll grant that I paraphrased the beginning of the conversation, but those last two lines are verbatim. That idea that a "real" feminist should be utterly unconcerned with looks was pretty pervasive on this campus in the late 80s, too.

Hugh said...

I am the among the first years of Gen X, only because I want to feel younger. I think I was telling someone that Gen Xers are the first to grow up without a pervasive fear of technology. Computers are not scary, confusing things.

Jeanne said...

Alison, perhaps my perspective stems from the fact that I don't see wearing overalls as being unconcerned with looks. Because personally, overalls are the MOST uncomfortable thing I can imagine wearing. Like SJG, I've always looked and felt better in skirts.
About pink, though--you still don't see a lot of color around the Kenyon campus!
Hugh, so if we grew up without computerphobia, we can count ourselves as Gen X??? No, probably not. I am of the generation that had to have some technical background to get into computers while still young enough to learn new tricks.

lemming said...

the 1960s were radical for some and deeply conservative for others - plenty of PhD seeking women were told to stay home and type their husband's dissertations, plenty of women still became "Mrs. John Smith" with great enthusiasm...

Jeanne said...

Lemming, I think you know the story of my mother showing up in Madison and being told she couldn't have her promised fellowship because she'd gotten married "and would just have a baby and quit." So she had me. And she did finish her PhD later, somewhere else.

Ron Griggs said...

To Hugh: My sense is that Gen-Xers were the first generation to have grown up with the concept that technology is bad or scary. I remember the "Better Living through Chemistry" days when technology was going to let us live like the Jetsons. You could fear not being able to keep up with change personally, but fear of technology?...that came later.

Joe said...

A purely semantic criticism (which I think you get, but I want to spell out) - "generation" is a misleading term that we should do away with. What we talk about as "generations" are actually descriptions of particular lifestyles, deeply dependent on the class (and racial, and gender) resources necessary to support them.

Generations are useful descriptive shorthand, but eventually they become general terms for groups of people, and at that point they mostly boil down to reasoning at the level of "hey you damn kids get off my lawn." ;-) (Or "old folks don't get it", take your pick.)

Put simpler - I don't think Snoop Dogg considers himself a Gen Xer.

Jeanne said...

Joe, good point. Part of what's bothering me about this book is not that I can't categorize the author in terms of age, but that no matter how many books I read about people from NYC--starting with Harriet the Spy--I just don't GET them!

Kim (Sophisticated Dorkiness) said...

This book was one of my favorites, and I think it still might be, but I haven't read it in a very long time! I just remember the reason it impacted me so much at the time was because I was struggling to figure out my feelings about feminism, and the part about the wedding dress seemed to make perfect sense. If this woman, who clearly was a feminist, could write something that I agreed with 100 percent, then it seemed to me that I needed to give feminism another chance. So the book prompted me to do some exploring at a time when I didn't quite know what to think, and I'll always love it for that.

bermudaonion said...

I enjoyed this book. I found it interesting that Frank McCourt was Susan Jane Gilman's teacher in high school.

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Jeanne said...

I will delete comments I can't translate; this includes anything in character-writing or Cyrillic.

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