It’s been a couple days since I finished the novel, and I still can’t decide whether I liked the ending.
My favorite line of diction: “However, as a lesson, I shall ball you.”
I closely followed the interruption of Myron’s thoughts in Myra’s act of raping Rusty. There is a time when she substitutes Myron’s opinion of homosexual delight as her own. “I was now afforded my favorite view of the male, they heavy rosy scrotum dangling from the groin above which the tiny sphincter shyly twinkled in the light.” I am making assumption that this is Myron, but on first reading, I did atrribute this snetiment to that part of the character’s psyche. Agree?
The character of Letitia is a tool Vidal uses to reaffirm all the accusations Myra previously made about heterosexuality (that I quoted in the previous post regarding sexual violence.) If Letitia’s love for Rusty’s sexual violence was not in the book, then Myra’s assumptions would have been completely false. I don’t know what the author is trying to achieve with this character. It seems that he is trying to support Myra’s characterization with the appearance of a similarly minded character. Without Letitia, Myra would have lost all credit once she chose to become Myron again.
In the beginning of chapter 37 you witness a complete switching of opinion made by Myra. In referring to Mary-Ann, “Of course, she is unique in her charm, her beauty, her womanliness.” She earlier claimed that Mary-Ann’s opinions of womanhood reiterated every expected societal role of the woman. Now she praises those qualities. It is here that my curiosity reached its climax. Why, when Myron was ‘alive’, did he pursue an interest in men, and then, as Myra, did she pursue in women? There is an obsession with the same sex from this character.
In the end, Myron is heterosexual and married. Does this reaffirm the roles of the sexes? This would mean that Myra failed miserably in re-creating them, and I don’t think she did. As a woman, she was stripped of the pressure to maintain the stereotypical masculine roles of identity and in turn realized she could be a man without them. Her tenderness towards Mary-Ann in the end is not her adaptation of a womanly role but the re-creation of man’s. She asks at the end of 37, “For what true purpose have I smashed the male principle on ly to become entrapped by the female?’
The middle ground that she praises at the end of the novel is the summation of her view the role of the sexes should play. Men and women should have both masculine and feminine qualities in order to create a happy balance of self. (I realize my statement is still separating sex roles, but I do believe this book to be an attempt at disproving them.)
