Submitted by Anne on Monday, June 5, 2006 - 3:36am

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“I could partake at last in the assumption of heterosexuality and ask out any woman I liked without insulting her.”  (p. 92)


Vincent’s chapter on love was intriguing.  Performing the role of a man, she had to “get out there” and be the proactive one, making the first moves.  The recurring theme was that Vincent, as a man - as every man - had to work double-time to prove himself worthy of the woman’s trust.  “It was the woman’s job to be on the defensive, because past experience had taught her to be.”  (p. 97)  The women Vincent-as-Ned dated brought with them their past experiences and future expectations.

“...if the way they discussed their pasts and the way they approached me was anything to go by, they seemed incapable of seeing any new man as an individual.  Worse still, they seemed to transform each new man, benign or otherwise, into the malignancy they were expecting him to be.”  (p. 107)

The women Ned dated brought with them emotional/psychological baggage and created the failures they expected/imagined would eventually happen.

To read how Ned brought along Norah necessarily was interesting - to see how Ned approached women, informed by Norah’s own experiences as a woman being approached by men.

Reading Vincent’s insights into the social expectations of a man and the individual expectations of men by each woman were enlightening.  “If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex.”  (p. 111)  That Vincent experienced “momentary misogyny” was not too surprising.  She went into this with her own presumptions and has experienced the unexpected.

Regarding the chapter on life, I’m not sure what I would expect going into a men-only monastery.  I got the feeling that Vincent expected more “liberalness”, more emotional freedom among the men - a place where men could be open and comfortable around other men for once in their lives, perhaps even forgetting they were “men” at all.  What she experienced was the opposite and, to my surprise as a reader, extremely homophobic.  At some points I was irked at Vincent’s belief that if the monastery had tolerated the presence of women it might help the monks to relax or somehow find and show their feelings.  Are men not capable of this on their own?  Although, from Vincent’s retelling of the monastery's attempt at hugging sessions, it seems this particular group of men was not.  Perhaps strongly influenced by their religious beliefs, the men in the monastery acted in ways that recreated the outside world in such a way as to be damaging.  Any show of emotion was uniformly shunned and at times outrightly prohibited.  Vincent’s telling of the more “intimate” experiences with individual monks attests to this damage (e.g. pgs. 179-80).

As for the Butler reading, my brain is still digesting (enter Monty Python voice of god) that which is JUDITH BUTLER.  I am mainly toying with her statements on pg. 122-3 regarding language and terms.  I’ve always been at odds with our language, semantics, and the reclamation of words.

I’d like to get some perspective on this piece in class.

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