Word: rossner
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Looking for Mr. Goodbar is Judith Rossner's very readable fictionalized account of the events leading up to Quinn's murder. It is an examination not so much of Quinn's killing as of her past; the way in which the 28-year-old schoolteacher's life, filled since childhood with an unexamined selfhatred, led to her sexual seekings at Mr. Goodbar...
Theresa Dunn, Rossner's Quinn-character, had been uncomfortable with herself, both physically and personally since age four when polio left her spine curved. Though the spine was straightened somewhat by an operation and a year in the hospital left her with only the slightest limp, Theresa always retained a sense of her illness as something shameful. Her parents treated her differently than their other children, both pitying her and feeling guilty for not being able to prevent her illness. Theresa felt as though her mother was constantly reproaching her for not being so pretty and athletic as her younger...
...Rossner is at her best when dealing with Theresa's estrangement from her family as a result of her illness. In Theresa's withdrawal from her family, her only connection with people aside from her rigidly structured parochial school, Rossner lays the groundwork for Theresa's passivity toward all the men in her life. Her reaction to the constant unspoken reproach, the pity, is to bury her anxiety over her deformity as deeply inside her as possible. But it preoccupies her constantly...
Theresa leaves her Bronx home to attend City College, where she becomes entangled with a sadistic, egotistical, boorish college professor and willingly loses her virginity. The professor is the only man in Looking for Mr. Goodbar that Rossner is able to portray convincingly. No longer young, he is interested in reaffirming his youth buy seducing the female students in his classes--or, rather, enticing them to seduce him--while at the same time constantly condescending to them to maintain his power and stature in their eyes as well as in his own. To Theresa's perpetual fears of bodily imperfection...
...Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Rossner...