Subject: Re: guide lines
From: Cheryl Cline (ccline@uclink4.berkeley.edu)
Date: Wed Jun 14 2000 - 19:32:19 GMT
Scottie Bowman wrote:
> On the other hand, I *have* looked at an awful lot
> of female wrists with modest scratch lines across them.
> And a number of others (also female) where the digging
> went deeper - but where the intention seems still not
> to have been suicide but that strange, pre-emptively
> controlling punishment which some girls, with true
> self-loathing, inflict on themselves.
>
> My point being that when a man is described as having
> mysteriously scratched wrists I have one of two reactions:
> either the writer does not know too much about suicide
> & has reverted to cliché thinking; or he wants us to see
> the character as somehow 'girlish' & 'hysterical'.
> Not the usual connotation with St Seymour.
>
My perspective on self-mutilation is that it is the manifestation of, or
reaction against, the poisons of society. Both of these, I suspect,
characterize St. Seymour (and quite a few of Salinger's protagonists) pretty
well.
These poisons of society in the case of young women stems, I believe, from
the enormous amount of misogyny and objectification of women as present in
the media and in daily life. I don't think that these are directly caused
by such biological criteria as sex (girlishness and hysteria), as your post
implied. Like anorexia nervosa, the causes probably do not stem from some
sort of anatomically induced predisposition to cut or starve oneself, if,
for example there just happens to be a rise in the number of actresses and
models with unhealthily low levels of body fat who are paraded around as the
"ideal" at the same time that more women enter hospitals for treatment of
anorexia and to get breast implants.
Also, I thought that self-mutilation among young women, along with the
similarly self-punishing anorexia, gained epidemic proportions only in the
last decade or so, long after Salinger ceased to publish anything about
Seymour.
Would you dismiss a young man who exhibited similar marks of such extreme
suffering as "boyish" and "testicular"? A certain character from a
particular novel comes to mind, one who put his hand through the garage
windows after the death of his beloved younger brother.
-Cheryl
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