At 03:04 PM 7/19/97 +0100, Berni Phillips wrote, regarding _Waking the Moon_:
>What I thought Hand was doing there was playing against the modern
>ideal of the nurturing, all-benevolent goddess. If we're to be full
>human beings, we need to acknowledge that we are wrong at times. One of
>the things that is wrong is the myth of the superwoman: the successful
>career woman with the perfect family who is Martha Stewart on the side.
>Most of us can't do that, and we shouldn't feel inferior if we don't
>measure up to this impossible standard. I thought Hand was knocking the
>goddess off her pedestal in the same way. She was giving her characters
>the right to be wrong and the goddess to be a bitch in the same way that
>male gods so frequently are cruel and capricious.
I think this is exactly what frustrated me about the book: it's already a
common belief that any woman with a drive to succeed, who doesn't let
others step all over her and coopt her, is a bitch (that is, cruel,
manipulative, egotistical). So I didn't enjoy Hand showing how, indeed,
this was the case. (I gave up hope right about when Angelica started
sacrificing people, though I did finish the book.)
-- Janice
-----
Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT
http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/jedhome.htm
Listening to: Feed Your Head, Volume 2; The Best of Márta Sebestyén
"...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected;
the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and
servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:29 PDT