The Campus & The Campus

“I lived east and south and bit of the Old Town...It was a heavily crosshatched street--clutch by clutch of architecture broken by alterity, even in a few spots house-by-house. The local buildings are taller by a floor or three than the others, so Besz juts up semiregularly and the roofscape is almost a machicolation”

Like the two towns in the novel, Chapel Hill has several buildings that appear to be from completely different areas. In this photo, you see an old house juxtaposed with a brand new, modern looking building. It almost seems as if the newer architect completely disregarded the surrounding buildings, yielding the result of “crosshatching” at various points on campus.

This compares to the two cities in the novel, in that the architects there literally disregarded all surroundings and “unsaw” the previous buildings, resulting in an awkward skyline.

To state the obvious, the situation is very different in that Chapel Hill is not “two cities” but one city that has poor planning and is constantly under construction.

The Good Kind of Confused

Wait so this isn't a Sex & the City spinoff?

Kidding. But even if I hadn't been joking around this post would have mostly likely started, ended, and been almost totally made up by question marks. Though we were warned in class that this book would be confusing at first, I wasn't quite prepared for what I read.

The most helpful thing I've read thus far, in relation to trying to understand the "concept" of two cities existing in the same place (maybe? I'm not even sure yet if that's right.) was the quote on the back cover of the book.

"...Skillfully examines the illusions people embrace to preserve their preferred social realities" (from Publishers Weekly, apparently).

So my theory as the concept is that the two warring cities are a metaphor for different parts of society, namely the upper and lower classes. Just as the people of Beszel “unsee” or avoid looking at Ul Qoma even though it’s visible, people of the higher class avoid looking at the seedier parts of any town (though I was mostly thinking about big cities having upscale parts and ghettos) despite the fact that they could, if they wanted to. If you look at cities like New York, it’s sometimes tempting to see Harlem as a totally different city than, say, 5th Avenue.

The whole being in the same place physically trips me up a bit, as I’m sure it was intended to. My brain can’t process that in one spot there could be two different spaces. Is that even right? The terminology of crosshatches, alters, etc throws me off quite a bit.

Does this remind anyone else of 1984 a little bit? Though it isn’t technically dystopian, Beszel seems pretty shady and undesirable, and the whole “unseeing” phenomenon reminds me a lot of the concept of doublespeak, where you say (or see) something but never really acknowledge it or process it. Either way, little bit mind blowing.

"Then again, he also made himself look like a ruthless murderer."

I was so caught off guard by the ending of House Rules that I literally passed out, hit my head on a coffee table, and woke up to my roommate dragging me out to the woods trying to set up a crime scene with what he supposed was my lifeless body. Just kidding, I figured out what happened like halfway through the book and trudged along until the end.

To be fair, though, I couldn't quite predict how the truth would come out, since apparently Emma and Oliver were dead set on never letting Jacob explain himself. I assumed they would go to court once the jury had decided on a verdict and Theo would confess to everything right before they announced it. What I didn't realize until the end, though, was that Theo still kind of assumed Jacob killed her despite the fact that he saw her fall and knew she didn't keep running after him. That seems silly and implausible to me, but so does the fact that Oliver and Emma live happily ever after despite the fact that they've only known each other for a month and only in a really, really weird context. But I digress.

I agree with what a few people said in class—that it was an interesting perspective on Asperger’s, but the rants on how the syndrome is entirely caused by vaccines just threw any credibility it had out the door for me. There is little to no scientific evidence that vaccines have any effect on autism in children. That was a rumor that actually started, I think, in England and spread like wildfire thanks to the internet. I just think it was quite silly of her to bring it up and turn what could have been a convincing narrative from the point of view of someone with Asperger’s into something that seemed like a weak lobbying attempt.

Anyway, I really wish that with this, my final entry on the book, I could write something deep and expository, something other than a reaction. But honestly I can’t find much to say other than it was fairly entertaining up until the last 150 pages or so.

House Rules

I suppose I will start off like everyone else and just say that I really like House Rules. I put off starting it because I assumed it was going to be a downer (and because I was busy finishing The Girl Who Played With Fire, which was pretty good), but from the first few pages, I was interested in the Hunt family’s story. While I have thus far been correct about it not being a terribly uplifting story, that hasn’t stopped me from flipping pages at a rapid pace.

My only exposure to Asperger’s has been through pop culture, but I feel like the representations I’ve seen do the syndrome a lot of justice and help thoroughly define what it means for both those suffering from it and their families. Picoult does an excellent job of helping readers get in Jacob’s shoes (which ironically, he couldn’t do in return) and see life through his eyes (but not literally… see what this book has done already?). The comparisons between having AS and being in a country where you don’t understand the language were especially poignant to me, and helped me better grasp what day to day life would be like for someone like Jacob.

One question I have, as the book progresses, is Picoult’s reason for writing the novel. As we previously discussed, mystery novels tend to be written without a real “goal” in mind other than solving said mystery, whereas realist books like Little Bee could be written to increase advocacy/empathy/etc. I wonder if Picoult wrote this purely as a compelling mystery book with complex relationships or if she intended to increase awareness of Asperger’s Syndrome. Either way, I find the book incredibly compelling, and I’m excited to read more.

Deconstruction Derby

So one of the generalizations often made about GWDT is that it has strong themes of female empowerment. With Lisbeth being the titular character, it comes across as a book about a woman who’s been victimized (both before and during the novel) who overcomes not only her own attacker but also another prolific murderer/rapist, proving her strength and independence. While this is definitely true, and Steig Larsson succeeds in creating what Ms. Magazine calls a “feminist hero,” the theory that this novel is empowering may not hold up when looking at the rest of the women in the novel.

With the exception of Erika Berger, every main female character in the book is a victim. Lisbeth gets violently raped by her guardian, Harriet gets raped by her father and brother, Cecilia’s husband was abusive, Isabella’s husband was a drunk who also raped her children, all of Lisbeth’s friends have apparently been sexual assault victims, etc etc. The pattern is clear and not coincidental—Larsson definitely had a message to deliver.

But other than Salander, arguably none of the rest of the women got their own revenge. Harriet did kill her father when she was 15, but her only solution to escaping Martin’s grip was to run away and let him continue raping and killing immigrants and prostitutes. Lisbeth even calls her a bitch, saying, “If she had done something in 1966, Martin Vanger couldn’t have kept killing and raping for thirty-seven years” (pg.544). She got some revenge, but in the end was still a victim of her brother’s abuse.

Cecilia was beaten by her husband, but instead of getting any real revenge, she just moves out and never even files for divorce. Isabella, instead of standing up for herself and her children, lets her husband do whatever he wants and turns a blind eye. These women are unquestionably still victims years after their abuse.

Finally, the more “anonymous” women of the novel get no real revenge for all their pain. Lisbeth, “did not know a single girl who at some point had not been forced to perform some sort of sexual act against her will” (pg. 249), yet none of these friends got to tattoo and blackmail their attacker. And all of Martin’s victims got absolutely no revenge and, in the end, not even the press knew they were dead. They were victims in the strongest sense of the word, but never got closure.

While I am a fan of the whole “kickass girl power” thing regarding Lisbeth, I found it a little disturbing that regardless of the victimhood of every other woman in the novel, the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is still touted as a “feminist” novel.