Literature’s power

Thinking about my own youth, and having just attended a huge, beautiful and extravagant Jewish wedding, I was reminded of a book that had a profound, if temporary, effect on my young life.  I was 13 or 14 when I read the book, Marjorie Morningstar, in which a young Jewish woman struggles with society’s injunctions, taking a lover, and eventually returning to her roots to marry a socially acceptable, even desirable, Jewish man.  My memories of the story focus on the conclusion, which seriously affected my own youthful sexuality.  At the end of the story, right before her wedding, Marjorie decides she must tell her fiancé ‘the truth’, that she is no longer a virgin.  Although the young man accepts her and marries her anyway, the result is an eternal loss for him, ‘his eyes never regain their brightness’ (or something to that effect).  To my young and impressionable mind,  this was a genuine morality tale, and one that inspired me to stop short of sexual intercourse for four or five years to come.  I could not bear the thought of potentially causing such everlasting pain to the man I would come to love—a testament to the interactions among human beings’ symbolic and cultural systems on the one hand, and the pragmatic dangers recounted in my last blog, on the other.

I looked up Marjorie Morningstar on the internet today, unsure if that was even the name of this book that had ruled an important part of my life for so long.  Written by Herman Wouk, it was published in 1955 (at the height of ‘the feminine mystique’).  I found a 2005 review by Alana Newhouse, subtitled ‘the conservative novel that liberal feminists love’.  Newhouse notes that the book has 556 pages of Marjorie’s life before her marriage as she acts out and struggles with her youthful rebellion; the once-so-powerful conclusion occupies only nine pages.  I am intrigued with the power of those final pages; and also with the fact that my adult life probably more closely fit with the spirit of the bulk of the book.  Certainly the message contained in the conclusion no longer attracts me.

A few weeks ago, I went to a play in Ithaca, NY, called ‘S/He’.  Before going to the play, I imagined a perhaps-futuristic story about transgender.  Instead, the play was a melding of youthful sexuality as played out conventionally in America and in Turkey (two countries with which I have long-standing links).  The most shocking aspect to me was the timelessness of the stories within each cultural context. 

  • In the American case, a young woman is attracted to a boy, who impregnates her in a combination of seduction and eventual rape.  She fears to tell her parents she is pregnant, but eventually does; she talks with her girlfriend and eventually explains that she was raped; she is advised by an unconventional older man (oddly, a tattoo artist).  In the end, in typical American fashion, she overcomes her misery and goes forth into the world with hope and positive expectations for her future.
  • In the Turkish case, surely unfamiliar to most viewers, the young people are in love.  The woman is advised repeatedly by her female friend not to make love with her beloved, as this will inevitably prevent him from marrying her—as she will no longer be a virgin.  We are shown the young man’s close relationship with his mother.  The young woman eventually does make love with him, is caught in flagrante by the mother who comes home unexpectedly, and this seals her fate.  In good Turkish tradition, true love always ends in disaster.  In the final scene, the two lovers are separated and ill, surely (from a Turkish perspective) dying.

Either of these stories could nearly as easily have been written, produced, observed in the 1950s, without much change, and still have had the same cultural punch as they had in 2011.  ‘It’s a strange strange world we live in, Master Jack.’

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