Mary Gaitskill's two stories in Double Takes are both painfully sexual accounts of characters pushing their own limits. They aren't 50 Shades of Grey -- these stories recount believable relationships with clear established rules in male/female dominance.
In your blog posts, think about what Gaitskill does to make these scenarios believable and not over-the-top. Or maybe you feel that these are over-the-top, and then write about why. Which characters do your sympathies lie? If any?
Also, look at the point of view of these stories. Especially in "A Romantic Weekend," the point of view tends to switch back and forth between He and She. What kind of effect does this have on you as a reader?
While reading both stories I found myself wanting to laugh at the characters and then cry for them as well. I think Gaitskill triggers such emotions from her readers because her scenarios and plots are so realistic. She steps back from the cliched concepts when it comes to her characters sexuality, and due to this, her scenes are much more realistic and believable. I don't think her tone is over the top at all, and I enjoyed reading both stories. The idea of sex and relationships being perfect, or sexy all the time isn't reality. The awkward moments and even depressing moments when the couples just don't click are captured in her stories.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I enjoyed both stories "A Romatic Weekend", stuck out to me, mainly because of the switch between the points of view. I think that having the narration change between the man and the woman not only made the story more interesting, but it also let me see what each character was thinking, while he/she was going through an action or witnessing, the others persons action. Hearing the guys point of view made me feel sympathy towards the woman, but then I also started to dislike her. When it came to her narration it would help me understand why she did or said the things she said. Either way to see what the characters were thinking about one another really made this vivid to me. I felt like the narration let me enter the story much deeper.
Reading these two stories left me with completely different reactions. In “Secretary,” I switched back and forth between surprise and sympathy for the narrator, Debby. At the beginning of her job, she seemed hollow, and like she actually enjoyed the dominant and aggressive attitude her boss showed her. That really surprised me, and in a way I saw her ask being weak and indifferent. But it was the points in which Gaitskill allowed Debby to show her emotions and how much she was hurt by it, I began to feel bad for her.
ReplyDeleteIn the other story however, I had a little trouble sympathizing for either character. It is clear that the male deserves sympathy the least because of his overall masochist and domineering personality, and how he strictly looked for someone meek and easy to control. But what surprised me about the girl at first was that she was drawn to him. Eventually I had some sympathy for her because of the reality of her situation, but it took some time.
What I liked about Mary Gaitskill’s writing is that the sexual component of both stories is not too over the top, though at times A Romantic Weekend felt border lining. The emotion infused within the central plots shows readers the realities of abusiveness in a relationship and how it affects those involved. I also liked how Gaitskill used both points of view in A Romantic Weekend to give readers insight into both sides of the relationship.
Gaitskill’s first story, Secretary was believably disturbing. To me, Debby was such a fascinating character. This woman feels nothing or seems to be so still and unmoved that she wants to work as a typist for the most plain and boring office possible. Her first encounters with her boss seem to bother her, mainly because he is trying to talk to her and she doesn’t want that. She wants the repetition of the work day and the ridiculously ordinary lifestyle. The first time he mistreats her, she secretly is thrilled, yet she is disturbed as the treatment continues, which to me a signal that she grows out of that state of mind. By the end, she is paid for her silence, and knows she was somewhat wrong to have kept herself in that position. I thought this story was nothing compared to A Romantic Weekend, which was actually an extreme for me.
ReplyDeleteIt was extreme, but it was also a sort of comical extreme that you normally wouldn’t think to be comical at all. The back and the forth did confuse me from time to time, just because so much “he” and “she” was used and the sections weren’t marked to give me more of a heads up about who was speaking when. The male character seemed over the top and a bit too psychotic, and Beth seemed out of her mind in another way for being comfortable with a man who wants to be able to beat her and make her his slave. I don’t know how to really feel about any of these particular characters, but Gaitskill did a fantastic job of getting us inside of their heads and make the way they were thinking seem normal. Whether or not this way of thinking is believably normal is up to the rest of her readers.
It’s funny because as I read through these stories, especially “Secretary,” I was thinking about how I felt the story was pretty unbelievable and then you asked us to comment on this in the blog post. I cannot really put my finger on why I find “Secretary” unbelievable, but I think it has something to do with the fact that everything seemed to happen so quickly to me. Also, I felt like it is sent in a time period that I am not familiar with. Besides that, I really liked these stories because Gaitskill does a good job showing the observations of the main character. I could easily get a sense of what Debby was feeling and seeing in “Secretary” and, in “A Romantic Weekend,” I liked the swapping of the points of view to get an idea of what each character was observing.
ReplyDeleteI appreciated the way Gaitskill got inside each of her characters's heads and showed us what they were all thinking, especially in "A Romantic Weekend." The scenarios for both stories were believable situations I suppose, but the way the sentences were structured just wouldn't let me take them seriously. '"Now read the letter to yourself. Keep reading it over and over again.' I read...He began spanking me as I read..." I just started laughing it was so abrupt. I imagine that wasn't what Gaitskill intended for me to do, but the choppiness and abruptness of her sentences just made it funny to me.
ReplyDelete"A Romantic Weekend" was even more over the top and weird. I didn't really feel sympathy for any of the two characters. The male was a sadistic character who looked for weak and vulnerable girls to be his victims. And the female, even though she didn't want to let him beat her, still stayed with him for an extended period of time. I liked the way I could get into the characters's head and try to understand what they were thinking, but again, the abruptness of the story was just humorous. "'Come on,' he coaxed. 'Let me beat you. I'd be much nicer after I beat you.'" I just can't read lines like this with a straight face.
Well these stories were not what I was expecting for “sexual accounts.” Instead of reading up on some steamy scene from a late night show I found myself the entire time I was reading that these are situations that are serious and realistic. Especially with “Secretary”—I’ve read/heard firsthand the idea of a male starting off sexual abuse verbally (“What’s wrong with you!” [306]) and then things quickly taking a turn for the worse. What I think is so believable with these stories is the overall theme of a male character dominating over a female character. In “A Romantic Weekend,” even if Beth really did think she was a masochist, that still puts the male character in control, an idea that has been around way before we ever first put words on a page. I think my instinctual reaction is to be sympathetic to the woman characters since of course I am a woman too. Yet as I was reading the second story, I felt more and more drawn to the male character not because he wasn’t creepy, because I think he was, but because he had moments where he seemed “human.” He says “My father’s a prick” (323) when he unhappily remembers his family and recognizes that he doesn’t want to be viewed that way: “Try not to make me feel like too much of a prick, okay?” (327).
ReplyDeleteAs far as switching back and forth from “He” to “She,” I really didn’t even take note of that until I read Chris’s blog! Third person point of view really makes me feel like I’m there with the characters and part of the conversation. It’s almost as if because there is not a narrator using first person, I could be the “I.” The “He/She” is a clever way to bounce back and forth between characters without causing the reader to notice the change. For example: “Don’t tell me I’ve broken your heart.” She continued crying. “This isn’t bothering me at all,” he said. We as readers have to quickly follow their dialogue and actions, and third person POV is an efficient way to do so.
I think one of the reasons why I felt the relationships Gaitskill wrote about seemed realistic was the level of gravity they were treated with. Both described episodes of S&M gone bad, and showed the dysfunctional relationship between the partners, but it was treated as a grave and serious manner (Fifty Shades of Grey--yes I'll admit to having read an excerpt of it; one day my morbid curiosity will do me in--another account of S&M gone wrong comes to mind, except there the author treats it as a normal, functional relationship). In a way, I did feel like they were a bit over the top, just because both of the men in the story were ridiculously sadistic (you know, because any man into S&M is a psychopath, and those types of relationships can't function normally). However, I think it might just be a bad selection (in that particular way) on the part of the editor. While I wasn't sure what to make of the protagonists(?) of "A Romantic Weekend" or the lawyer, I definitely felt sympathy for Debbie. The psych major in me reared it's ugly head, while I was reading "The Secretary" and was saying "Holy crap! She totally sounds like she has a dissociative disorder, or depression!" (and then she sort of told us that at the end, which made me feel smart...) It might be just me, but I love it when an author is able to communicate that to their audience without coming out and saying "Debbie has a dissociative disorder." or relying upon stereotypes of those illnesses.
ReplyDeleteI also kind of liked the switching of perspective between he and she in "A Romantic Weekend". It sort of disoriented me, but I liked it, because it felt like the disorientation and confusion that the characters were experiencing in the actual story. I think it also flowed very seamlessly together, so while it was something that I noticed and had an effect upon me, it wasn't so in your face that it just made me roll my eyes at it.
I really enjoyed how Gaitskill switched point of view in “Romantic Weekend.” I found that I was able to better understand the characters through their observations. For example, on pg. 317, “He saw that her face had become very tense. He could’ve increased her discomfort, but for the moment he had lost the energy to do so.” This line helped me see that the man liked to have control, and is used to being in control because he knew how to make the woman more uncomfortable. I could see that the woman was simply an object in his game (torturing an insect-316). I liked being able to see the contrast between the man and the woman’s points of views in the beginning because it allowed me to see the other person through their eyes. For example, Pg. 3 “She noticed a piece of bright orange pizza stuck between his teeth, and it endeared him to her.” As far as sympathy in this story, I felt more sympathy towards the woman in this story simply because it was hard to feel bad for a male character who thought things like “He would beat her and fuck her mouth. Then he would go home to his wife, and she would make dinner for him.” If anything, I felt sympathy for him having such horrible thoughts.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the scene on pg. 306 in “Secretary “where the narrator’s lawyer spanks her does seem somewhat unbelievable, I thought that it was made more believable by Gaitskill’s use of specific details. “He began spanking me as I said “referring”…”He spanked me for about ten minutes. I began crying on it, which blurred the ink.” These details helped me picture the scene better, which I think made the scene (as well as the act) more believable to me.
I found the second story to be more over-the-top than the first one. I think this comes from how blunt the two characters are with each other and, obviously, all the “things” they talk about. But the story, along with the first, is successful at representing sexuality without being “sexy.” This makes sex seem passionless and unsettling. The characters are sympathetic as, through their sexual actions, they are presented as being lonely, lost individuals. They seek these sexual outlets where they become aroused by wild fantasies, yet do not know what they truly desire.
ReplyDeleteI suppose what also made “The Romantic Weekend” less disturbing than “Secretary” is that, while the characters are flawed, I never got a real sense of danger. The guy never actually beat the girl and, like I mentioned above, they were so blunt with each other and nothing was kept hidden which added to the dark humor. With Deb in “Secretary,” she keeps everything to herself which explains how depressed she really is. She doesn't know what she wants or what is right for her which is why she finds herself aroused by the lawyer. It's clear in both stories how characters can look to sexual opportunities that, even if different from what they truly want, help express and define their emotions.
While reading these stories, I was extremely uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable due to the content of the stories, but rather the willingness of the characters to give in to male dominance. The first story, "Secretary," was a little predictable for me. I had a feeling that the lawyer was going to pull something like that just because while she was being interviewed for him, I myself felt uncomfortable in the situation, and could imagine being...basically looked at like a piece of meat and feeling extreme discomfort. What made it worse was that Gaitskill turned Debby into actually enjoying what the lawyer was doing, and that in the end, she defends him by not speaking out about his actions. In "The Romantic Weekend," I was just as equally disturbed by the woman's need to be hurt, and the fact that it is a feeling she welcomes by this domineering man who says he wants a slave. Humorous at best, "The Romantic Weekend" could be interpreted as the male having the insecurities, as could be seen when it was in his point of view, because he is constantly being drawn back to her even though he claims he wants nothing to do with her because she is unglamorous.
ReplyDeleteI think that the reason I was so uncomfortable with these two stories was the sheer bluntness in which they were written. Gaitskill turns sexual opportunities and actions into something bland and routine rather than something done with emotion, and it is so under-detailed that I become uncomfortable imagining the two characters doing those actions. In this, I think she makes her scenes believable and relatable. It helps the reader to not so much focus on the actions themselves, but rather the characters and their thought processes during the entire process.
While I was reading Gaitskill's short stories, "Secretary" and "The Romantic Weekend," I felt very uncomfortable just like Jazmine. Not only because of how Gaitskill wrote the stories in a manner that seemed so casual, but also because she made the female characters in the story so submissive. In "Secretary," the main character doesn't even act like what her boss is doing to her is unnormal. When he first tells her to pull down her pantyhouse and her underwear, she doesn't even question what he is doing verbally nor does she even voice her discomfort when he is doing whatever he may be doing behind her. Gaitskill leaves that scene for the imagination by avoiding the describing exactly what was happening. She simply gives us a small detail of her excitement towards what is happening and that made me feel very uncomfortable even after her boss constantly told her he was not going to rape her. Overall, I liked how Gaitskill wrote her short stories because even though they made me feel uncomfortable to read them that is what I like to believe were her intentions. Sex, in general, is a awkward thing to talk about, so why should writing about it be any different
ReplyDelete