Word: marination
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...California woman and by empirical evidence will piece together Charlotte Douglas's life. It is through this narration that we learn that Charlotte believes the world is peopled with others like herself and, as a result, selectively remembers events to conform to this idea. Charlotte has lost her child, Marin, to history, and this event disrupts the complacency of her life. The newspaper accounts and pictures of Marin--this Patty Hearst-type revolutionary, who speaks over television and radio about the "fascist police" and the "class struggle"--in no way mesh with the sweet personality that Charlotte declares is Marin...
...poeple using each other, are all victims of this selective memory--the only way in which Charlotte, as a child of a comfortable family in the temperate zone, can come to term with the present. Grace tells us, "she was immaculate of history and innocent of politics." Marin's disappearance is "the only event in Charlotte's life to resist her revisions and erasures." Ultimately, it is Marin who makes Charlotte realize that "it" really does not come out alright...
Charlotte's fear, Grace Strasser-Mendana tells us, is that of looking back. The axiom, "Remember Lot's Wife, avoid the backward glance," dictated Charlotte's life until Marin disappeared. And then despite her outward ignorance of the world around her--her desire for this child like protection from life--the past is unwillingly thrust upon her as an explanation for the present complications. But for a person who has always believed that things work out fine in the end, the rising to the surface of past failures is the ultimate blow. "It wasn't the way she thought...
...wasn't the way she thought I was and Marin...
wasn't the way she thought Marin...