paper thoughts
So right now I’m thinking of a topic in line with the family/nation thread of both Oscar Wao and Disgrace, specifically linking the idea of sex as a part of a national projected identity. Lucy tells David in Disgrace that her rape was, in the eyes of her attackers, the debt she owed to live on her land – that they were simply tax collectors, come to take their due. She repeatedly uses Africa in her arguements with David; her ‘this is Africa’ mentality assumes that Africa is a continent, South Africa a country, in which the inexcusable things that happen to women become acceptable – or, if not acceptable, then tolerable - simply because they are commonplace. When Lucy and David are speaking about her rape in plain terms, she says, speaking of men and sex, ‘you are a man, you should know’. I want to link the acceptability of them talking about this, of the social and physical differences between the Lucy/attackers and David/Melanie relationships, and the role of the country in the development of those relationships. Very big and ambiguous, too many themes, and vague, but i’m working on it.
The same for Oscar Wao. The idea that the typical Dominican male is sexually promiscuous, or at least has many female conquests, is very important to the book… I want to explore what that means for women in comparison. Rape in the DR seems as tolerated by women as it is in South Africa. Beli disregards Lola’s complaint of rape as a child in comparison to what she considers worse troubles; La Inca sees her daughter’s post-pubescent body and wonders why ‘God gave you that burden in this country’. Lola, exploring sex in the DR, says ‘One thing you can count on in Santo Domingo. Not the lights, not the law. Sex. That never goes away.’ Sex, willing or unwilling, is as heavy a thread in Oscar Wao as it is in Disgrace, and it unites through the family as it does through the nation.
My quotes werent exact… they were more like paraphrases, which is why i didnt put page numbers. Still thinking it through, though.
