Word: theresa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...professor's eventual rejection of Theresa leaves her life filled only with a boring teaching job, and she begins to stalk bars for one-night stands. Though she makes a few attempts at longer relationships, they are usually dismally unbearable for her, because, fearing rejection, she avoids emotional involvement. Feeling she is inadequate to hold any man worth getting involved with, Theresa allows herself only sensual attachments...
...long-term affairs Theresa does have are, for the most part, unconvincingly presented and major flaws in Goodbar. Her relationship with Tony, a violent Italian, becomes too obviously the acting out of a rape fantasy. This tough garage mechanic is too stereotypically animalistic to be believable. Theresa's longer involvement with James, a lawyer, is both unpleasant and impossible, she decides, because he is too nice for her either to love or to enjoy sex with. Rossner fails to make James realistic--his appearances at Theresa's apartment are just too altruistic and passionless...
...THERESA'S MURDER by a man she picks up in Mr. Goodbar after her unsatisfying attempts at involvement with both Tony and James is not a political commentary on rape by Rossner. It remains a senseless act but not connected with the violence--both physical and emotional--in Theresa's life. Her death is unintended; the murderer sees himself as victim. It is, in a way, just one more example in Theresa's life of her inability to emotionally communicate with anyone. Though a few other women in Looking for Mr. Goodbar seem to pursue normal relations with both...
...this comment is not really effective, for Theresa's plight is never totally convincing. One can only look to the book's sensationalistic subject to explain why Looking for Mr. Goodbar has been found on the best-seller lists...