The role of sex and the way characters interact with each other sexually in this novel illustrates the perverse nature of their environment and the loss of innocence. It seems that nothing is off limits or sacred, even Billie asks his wife to have sex with his cousin to make him straight, the narrator is forced to play make out games with their cousin, Billie is involved in homosexual acts with the neighbor while he wife is in a drunken stupor. The children are exposed to all sorts of sexual acts and no one seems embarrassed or bothered by these things that are going on around them. It just all seemed so bizarre that no one ever spoke up or showed any signs of being bothered except when the little girl ran away from her grandfather and was terrified to eat dinner with him. Also, the incestuous behavior was also shocking and I wondered what drives people to do this? Maybe if your family members were the last people on earth but there were clearly other people in the town; is this just the cultural norm that is being bred? It is so easy for parents to pass bad habits on to their children and I think this accounts for the sad state of affairs that took place in this family and continued through all the generations.
Friday, February 13, 2009
The Role of Sex in The Pink Institution
The most striking thing about novel to me was that in four generations, there did not seem to be any change in the situations of the people. Their environment may have been changing but the same sense of desperation, poverty and perversion surrounded them. There was a loss of innocence that came with just being a part of this family. The patriarch of the family evoked the image of Frank Henrickson on HBO’s Big Love; a mean, violent and perverse old man. There is also an absence of dignity that prevalent throughout the novel.
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First I am quite certain that everyone was bothered by the sexual content of this novel but it is a rather difficult issue to speak about out in the open. And I feel that this discomfort is one of the main reasons Satestrom decided to include the graphic sexual content in the work. Satestrom seems to be all about giving voice to the unspoken and bringing to light stories that are often left out because it is uncomfortable. The novel is a collection of very fragmented stories, and a rather small collection of stories that cover four generations of a family. We have to consider all that is left out in between. She chooses to leave out stories of normalcy and assumed sparse memories of happiness. Instead she focuses on the depressing and revolting. I am quite sure there is a diliberate attention made to the sexual abuse because abuse, especially backwoods, southern abuse is often not spoken about and is a taboo subject for families that experience abuse.
ReplyDeleteAlso it seems to be a story of abuse and then redemption. That redemption comes from coming clean of all the horrible transgressions in the families past. It seems to be as if the narrator is telling all the horrible stories of sexual abuse, in order to set her family free from the weight of the burden that those instances carry.
In addition, and I may be looking to far into this, I feel that the really messed up stories of sexual abuse and other forms of abuse are there to symbolize how destroyed the deep south was by the Civil War. It shows that the South is a place that has never really recovered from the war. There are practices that were seemingly acceptable around the time of the confederacy that manage to hold on in areas of the deep south. And in a mocking way, I feel Saterstom is highlighting the obsession the deep South has with its 'glory days of old' and showing, through this family, that those ideas of grandeur are really messed up.
I also just want to know what people feel about race in this novel. There are only a few instances where racism are visible. I was wondering if anyone can comment on why they feel Satestrom did not include this topic more.
More important than the gross nature of the sexual scenes within The Pink Institution is the objectivity of women displayed throughout the "novel".
ReplyDeleteOver and over we see female characters abused in the book by males in their families and society. I do not think that the author has the reader sympathize for a male character at any point in this book, and I think that is of telling importance to the novel's themes and the author's intents.
There is a passage on page 83 and 84 that I believe highlights the author's feelings about the state of women in the south during this time period.
"Vein-laden tracks gather, thighfat the click click sound. I knit. Wasp nest stitch. We are weighted. Red eclipsed meat shaded. Found bones inter frozen ground. Our shelves are thin, our sugars, hard. We winter amid the lining.
Easter makes them we make them we eat we eat eat them. A hard boiled trick egg comes out her palm. Her blood hand holds her white hand."
This passage really makes me think about the slaughtered pink pig on the cover. It seems to breathe helplessness - like the way the pig might feel while being hung up and bled.
Is the author using this passage and the pig as a metaphor for women in the south? Any thoughts?
Going back to some of the questions posed in the original post, I think the cycle of abuse really just goes to demonstrate the type of toxic environments that sometimes can get created. Additionally, and unfortunately, that type of toxicity is the type of thing that, without some sort of intervention, some life altering moment, some saving grace, does tend to get passed down throughout generations.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Satterstrom was very deliberately making this point. She could have chosen to end the book very differently with the last generation having more thoroughly broken the chain, she could have chosen to follow another sibling somewhere along the line as some of them did seem to have made decent escapes, but instead, she followed the family members in the heart of the abuse and poverty. I think overall, this book creates an insightful expose of some of the horrors of life that some individuals face.
I'd like to start off with a little humor at the South's expense, and I feel its inappropriateness is oddly appropriate given the context.
ReplyDeleteA southern boy is talking to his father. He says, "Pappy, I really want to marry Sallie May and I was wonderin' if it'd be alright."
"Is she a virgin?" His father replied.
"Yeah, pappy, she's a real nice girl," the boy answered
"Well then heck no," the father yelled. "If she ain't good enough for her own family, she ain't good enough for ours."
I think Saterstrom chose to make sexual (mis)conduct a point of focus in her book for two primary reasons. First, it serves as an important counterpoint to people's perception of the south. And second, it illustrates the effects of the narrator's upbringing on her psyche.
I think we may have touched upon it briefly in class on Thursday, but the heinous sexual acts committed totally negate and perhaps even add elements of humor to the Confederate Ball excerpts between chapters. Here's an example: "Unlike many past civilization which acquired tremendous wealth these people, although gay and admirers of the beautiful in all things remained deeply religious." Compare that with the scene of Micajah masturbating in front of his granddaughter. These people certainly did admire the beauty in everything...even their own relatives. These comparisons seem to reinforce Marissa's assertion that the graphic nature of the book serves to contrast the glory of the old south with the ruination of the new post-Civil War south.
I was amazed with the objectivity and strict matter-of-factness with which the narrator presented these extraordinarily disturbing events, never lingering on one long enough to judge or say how disgusting they all are. And since Saterstrom chose to convey the story through the filter of a narrator, the manner in which these events are recounted reflects on the narrator's personality. The irony, then, is that the lackadaisical, objective recollection of these events actually indicates their extremely profound impact. The narrator's sense of normal, of right and wrong, of appropriate and inappropriate, has been defiled to the point where things like incest and rape don't seem in any way abnormal. At least not to the point of dwelling on them. It's almost as if she would have read my joke and said "yeah, he's got a point."
This book has no sense of prosperity or overcoming of troubling time. I understand that its post civil war but I don't think that explains or even attempts to justify all the awkward sexual acts.
ReplyDeleteI think that Satestrom left out any type of development or events that are not sexually driven or any types of health relationships for a reason. Its as if she is trying to tell a story that is often not told about post civil war. I'm also not surprised that she did not include anymore instances of racism because that would just be a statement of the obvious. We know the historical climate surrounding the civil war and it was not needed and would not have added to the message she was trying to deliver.
I think the first point brought up by Zanele is particularly interesting. Why was there no improvement in the situation of previous generations? I actually saw a bumper sticker on a car the other day that could lend some answers to this question and also provoke some questions. The sticker simply read: "Racism is not a family value." My interpretation of the sticker was that it was speaking to the tendency of racism to be passed on between generations simply because families are surrounded by it all times. As wrong as it is, it continues to exist in some regions because people don't see anything different. I think that is much of what is happening in Selah Saterstrom's book. People are learning from preceding generations and do not grasp that there are different ways of living.
ReplyDeleteThis provokes several further questions as well. Such as: What is a family value? Everyone hears the expression of "family values" thrown around which forces the question of what is actually encompassed under this title.
Considering the context of what was right and wrong is very fluid(with a few exceptions), it doesn't strike me as odd whatsoever that given the environment these children were raised in that they wouldn't rebel against what we realize to be terrible conditions of abuse. I think it's interesting as well that throughout the entire novel, there is a relative lack of interaction with what I would be tempted to call the "Outside" world. This only seems to reinforce the levels of disparity between right and wrong in our eyes and right and wrong in theirs.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think it speaks to later generations that seem to at least mitigate to some extent the abuse, by being outgoing and more willing to interact with the "outside" world. This in turn might lead to the conclusion that they are slowly becoming more normal, especially when coupled with the line about catching one's breath as opposed to losing it.
In reference to the four generations mentioned I was a little confused about this. I wondered if the author was trying to emphasize family history or more of a historical context of the culture. I felt like this story did not have a lot to actually do about family, but more about the generational changes or lack of changes that occurred in Southern Culture.
ReplyDeleteOn a side note, I was disappointed with the "feel" of the book. I read the back of the book and was looking forward to the Southern heritage and female generational story. It reminded me of the same context of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. I was disappointed with the lack of connection that I was able to make with the characters. Did anyone else feel this way? I didn't expect the story to be romanticized or easy to read. I respect the harshness and reality of the story. I just wish I was able to connect with the characters and sympathize with their pain in some way.
Ah, hillbilly humor. All the fun of racism without the risk of NAACP lawsuits.
ReplyDeleteIn this book, the South has been plunged into the Uncanny Valley. JWestfall makes a good point about how the characters in the book don't seem real to him, and I'm thinking that maybe this is the point. Maybe Saterstrom means to imply that the whole family is emotionally dead, and does so by having them act unnaturally and preventing the reader from emphasizing with them, aside from their unfortunate situation.
I'll tell you what this reminds me of, and that's Chuck Palahniuk's (author of Fight Club) works. I get the same air of nihilism and decay from this book, though since the narrator doesn't become a character until about halfway through the book, she isn't as prominent as Palahniuk's narrators. His narrators are also an island of sanity in a mad world, and this one clearly is as damaged as everyone else.
This thread is really wonderful; there's so much I want to comment on that I don't know where to begin. The connection of the sexual deviance portrayed in the text with the endlessness of this family's cycle of despair and then forward to the status of the South seems both inevitable and unbearable in Saterstrom's world. In some ways, the entire family's pain and perversion can be traced back to Micajah's molestation of his daughter; if something like that isn't openly recognized and cast out, how can it be absorbed? And by the same token, the text asks us, can the south absorb and rise out of the atrocities of its history--can any culture? Yes, in many ways the text attempts to speak the "unspeakable"--incest, rape, poverty, shame. It's a difficult thing to encounter this subject matter portrayed with such distance. As for the Uncanny Valley...indeed.
ReplyDelete