The Chauvinist's Corner :)
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Sun, 15 Feb 1998 14:22:53 -0500 (EST)
In a message dated 98-02-15 13:12:30 EST, you write:
<< But maybe Franny is no more than an updated version of the Victorian
heroine who's *expected* to flop about the place with attacks of the
vapours. Adolescent girls have been going in for this sort of thing
since time immemorial. Young women of the obsessional persuasion
seem to have an especial predilection for starvation linked to the
idea of Higher Things. I'm surprised in a way no one has suggested
Fran might be an anorexic somewhat before it became the
fashion. (Although, of course, I'm not at all suprised.)
Scottie B. >>
Oh, shoot Scottie, if we're gonna be making generalities about women, now,
let's run with it :)
In my experience women's minds, emotions, sense of self, connection to nature,
spirituality, and bodies are intricately linked in ways that we of the Penile
Persuasion can never really fully understand or appreciate. In Franny's case,
it may not be a question of Pregnancy OR Anorexia OR Spiritual Crisis. They
could all very easily run together. Either/Or thinking just doesn't work with
many women--gotta think in multitasking, Both/And terms.
When I rejected the idea of Franny's pregnancy I did it on, well, more
Literary terms, revealing myself to be the truly pretentious jerk I really am
:) It's not that Franny's physical symptoms could not possibly be related to
pregnancy or anorexia, as well as her mood and spiritual crisis. It's just
that I find myself asking, "What the hell would be the point of that within
the context of the story?" The story **is** about a spiritual crisis--only
the densest of readers could read the closing pages of the story and not get
that. And given the relative truth of the facts I affirmed about women just
one paragraph up, I could much more easily see a deep spiritual crisis causing
physical problems than I could see a physical crisis--pregnancy or anorexia--
revealing or highlighting a spiritual crisis. If the physical symptom are the
product of a physical crisis, I don't understand the meaning of the physical
crisis to the story. It just doesn't make sense.
So it's not that the idea of pregnancy is That hard to swallow given Franny's
physical symptoms, but that it just doesn't make sense within the context of
the story, and it certainly means nothing to the end of the story, unless you
want to go in for some shallow allegorizing that Salinger seems to avoid...
Jim