Lynn's Coming of Age

The stencil metaphor in "Knife Grinder" chapter is basically saying that each group defines itself by tearing the other one down. The villagers spend the entire meeting making the Romani into the worst possible version of themselves, and then when Jason ends up at the Gypsy camp, he sits by the fire and listens to them do the exact same thing about gorgios. The mother goes off about how dirty non-Romani people are. Clem Ostler is sneering about them sleeping with their pets. They are doing exactly what the villagers were doing. And Jason catches it. He thinks about how the Gypsies wanted the villagers to be gross, "so the grossness of what they're not acts as a stencil for what they are" (Mitchell 232). That is such a specific way to describe it and I think it is perfect. A stencil does not show you what something is. It shows you the shape of everything around it. Both groups are doing that. They are not defining themselves by anything real about who they are. ...

One of the hardest things to ignore about Fun Home is how clearly Alison and Bruce needed each other to be something neither of them could be. They were almost like reversed mirrors. Alison grows up tomboyish, always leaning toward short hair and men's clothing, and Bruce spends his life restoring their Victorian house with this obsessive attention to beauty, to curtains and wallpaper and flowers. Bechdel draws this contrast constantly, but nowhere more clearly than in the barrette scene. Bruce asks young Alison where her barrette is, tells her it keeps the hair out of her eyes, and she fires back at her father, "So would a crewcut" (Bechdel 96). And that is basically their entire relationship shown in those two panels. Bruce is trying to pin femininity onto his daughter, almost literally, and she is already pulling away from it without even thinking about it. Her cousins nickname her "Butch," and she loves it. Meanwhile, Bruce, who holds all this authority in ...

Dodo Conway is barely in The Bell Jar, but I think she might be one of the most important characters in it. Even her name feels deliberate. Plath seems to have quite literally named this woman after an extinct bird, and not just any bird. The dodo was flightless, studied and catalogued by scientists like a specimen before it went extinct, defined almost entirely by its biology and its inability to go, quite literally, anywhere. Plath naming this character Dodo doesn't feel like a coincidence. She lives next door to Esther's family, and every time she appears, she is pregnant, pushing a baby carriage and trailed by "two or three small children…wobbled along in the shadow of her skirts" (Plath 116). She is not presented as miserable or trapped. She is devoted to her life, almost radiant in it, and that is exactly what makes her so unsettling to read. Plath doesn't use Dodo to argue that domesticity is a trap for all women. She uses her to show that it doesn't ma...

Everyone talks about how Phoebe represents childhood innocence in The Catcher in the Rye, but I think that completely misses what she’s actually doing for Holden. She is not just a “pure” or “innocent” kid; she is his conscience. She’s the person who sees through all his bullshit and actually holds him accountable.  Throughout the whole novel, Holden is desperately searching for a human connection. He tries talking to cab drivers, strangers on trains, people at bars, and really anyone who will listen. He never finds what he’s looking for, and he keeps spiraling deeper into his depression and loneliness. When Phoebe shows up, he finally gets what he has been craving. Someone real. Someone who will actually talk to him, not at him or past him. The second he tells her he’s home early from Pencey, she sees through it immediately. “You did get kicked out! You did!” she says and then hits him (214). She’s not playing along with his fantasies or letting him hide behind his facade of lies...