Word: instinctiveness
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Virginia Woolf once wrote that what women really wanted was a room of their own. Marge Piercy, in her latest novel, The Longings of Women, echoes that sentiment. Yet where Woolf infused her writing with the powerful appeal of a yearning for feminine creative space, Piercy identifies this fundamental instinct as a fear of losing material possessions...
Consider a text by Joyce Carol Oates, her latest novel, called Foxfire, Confessions of a Girl Gang. Oates, a gifted writer with an instinct for the violent and gothic, has invented the story of teenage girls banded together as secret female warriors in the '50s in upstate New York. The narrator, called Maddy-Monkey, describes the '50s: "It was a time of violence against girls and women, but we didn't have the language to talk about it then." Her heroine, Legs Sadovsky, tells the gang, "It's all of them: men. It's a state of undeclared war, them...
...trouble, if it is a trouble, is simply that of any fourth installment. The first wild surge of narrative invention has steadied to a reliable chug. The author's moves are clever and effective, but they are known. Her characters have told the darkest of their secrets. Erdrich's instinct, as the momentum of an anecdote is about to tail off, is to save matters with literary magic. This works, often brilliantly, but it works again and again, which may be a few astonishments too many...
When movie gays are prominent, it is often as murderous villains or vixens -- in Cruising, in Basic Instinct and (though Demme denies the killer is gay) in The Silence of the Lambs. Philadelphia would say of gay men, No, they are / also victims. Perhaps gays are more endearing to the average moviegoer if they are nobly wasting away rather than showing affection or passion...
...means necessary. Probably it all started when Louise -- or was it Thelma? -- dispatched that scumball would-be rapist in the parking lot of a bar. In fact, we can't get enough of warrior-woman flicks: Sigourney Weaver in Alien, Linda Hamilton in Terminator II, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. These are ladies who wouldn't slice anything off, one suspected, unless they meant to put it straight into a Cuisinart...