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Passage 1: The first aspect of the reading that I reacted strongly towards was a very simply sentence that the narrative says that resonated with me deeply. It takes place at the beginning of the novel when the narrator is describing how her father is obsessed with interior design and different types of furniture and she says, “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.” I feel this is a very passionate and interesting way to describe a parent’s love for a child. More often than not, I feel as though parents either treat their children like accessories or value certain possessions more than they value their own child. This was the moment in the novel where I really could understand the child’s pain of having an absent father. My own mother tended to value certain aspects of her life more than she did her own child, so I could really relate to how empty and worthless this can make a child feel. I really saw a piece of my own childhood in this passage.
Passage 2: The second passage I am choosing to focus on is also one that is really just a simple sentence out of the novel that held a lot of weight with me. It is when the narrator is describing the difference in her relationship with her father and with her mother, and how really the one with her father just could not have compared but really that was okay, “Although I’m good at enumerating my father’s flaws, it’s hard for me to sustain much anger at him. I expect this is partly because he’s dead, and partly because the bar is lower for fathers than for mothers.” While I am not entirely sure what to make of the mention of the bar being lower for fathers than mothers, I would much like to explore that idea. I feel there is a certain emphasis placed on a bad mother for it seems there is a stereotype that women should simply have an innate ability to care for a child that men may not have. Perhaps men are given more understanding for being bad fathers than mothers are because they aren’t expected to be soft and nurturing. I am curious to know what others feel about this passage because I am struggling to fully pinpoint exactly what she is saying or deciphering the underlying message.
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In response to your second passage. When I read that passage for a second time it was one that struck me as well. I think that perhaps the 'bar' is set higher for mothers (if it truly is) because they are the biological carriers of the baby for 9 months so society thinks that because of this that the mother automatically has that emotional attachment to accompany the literal physical one.
ReplyDeleteI think this question also relates to the idea of evolution. If a large part of society believes that we are similar to members of the animal kingdom, say primates for example, then they might assume that since female primates seem to exhibit an innate ability to know what to do in order to take care of their babies then human females should also function this way. But I think this philosophy is muddled in the fact that primates do not have popular culture polluting their minds with differing images and ideas of what it is to be a mother and to take proper care of their babies. Primates are stuck relying just on one another and familial examples while humans have such a wider variety of places to pull from.