Word: gordons
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...GORDON'S STRENGTH, her clever wit, turns out to be a weakness, for she fails to discriminate between her targets. When all are subject to her barbs, it leaves her novels without a confident voice, a voice which isn't undermined. We sympathize with her heroines, we pity them, but we do not respect them...
...only relief in a Gordon novel is her wonderful sense of humor: "She was incapable of deceit, not through any strength of character, but because she lacked the intellectual apparatus either to invent or sustain...
...fact, there are no power figures whatsoever in her books. Without a note of authority, there can be no reversal, no redistributions of power, no drama. Gordon affects change and movement by elimination of characters, dying fathers, cast-off lovers...
...absence of an authoritative voice can be explained. Gordon's concern with the theme of friendship leads naturally to this condition. Friendships are relations with shifting support, one woman depends on another and then vice versa. If relations are in flux we might not expect a simple weighty voice...
...Gordon's women never fully return to the religion they relinquish. They remain what Santayana once called "Catholic atheists." They are torn, nonbelievers in a Christian world. They sacrifice, remain uncomfortably independent but not free. They are unsettled but satisfied in their place before the Absolute in the company of women...