Defiance
by Carole Maso
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Bernadette O'Brien: misfit...child prodigy...professor of mathematics at Harvard...sentenced to die in the electric chair for the shocking murder of two male students. In her journal, her death book Bernadette takes a dark look back at the unfolding events that led to the extraordinary crime for which she was convicted.In the incandescent, erotically charged prose for which she is known, Maso probes the depths of a female psyche inextricably embedded in a uniquely American matrix of show more sexuality, violence, and the clash of class difference. A raw and fearless performance by an author of fierce vision, Defiance stays with readers long after they put the book down. show lessTags
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This notebook has been more of a companion than I could have imagined. How strange that I have come to know it at this late hour. One more thing to lose in this chronicle of loss. And to those of you who will read this later, with a kind of magnifying glass, combing it for clues—What is its message, blurred, in a cloud bottle, washed onto a strange shore. I am broken tonight. More than usual even. Into your hands, Liz. The brunt of my bewilderment.
A clusterfuck, in the most deliciously visceral sense of the word. Change the hovering 'it was amazing' to 'it is important', and you'll be getting somewhere.
I have to wonder how many turned tail at the sight of 'Feminism' hanging out in the Genres section of the book page. This is the same show more train of thought that bemuses itself over the word 'polemic' being bandied with witless ease as an excuse for plunging the rating downward. Along with political, subjective, obscene. Don't even get me started on the word hysterical.
Try anger on for size. Fury, virulent coursing of blood and bone, seething in from unearned malice and spewing out in all forms and succulent fecundities. Whether 'tis just or not, unfortunately, depends on the perpetrator, and the 'Feminism' floating just above the 'Literary fiction' and sinking just below the 'Novels' should give you enough of an idea of just who fits the bill of 'righteous fury'. Patriarchy, anyone?
So, this particular tract does not let us escape. Suspension of disbelief is rampant, yes, what with the child prodigy and the Harvard professor and the murder and the sadomasochistic spurts and schizophrenia and the female. Yes. Female, with boyfriends cooling in the fridge. If they were male? Too common, been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the slogan and the society wide acceptance for that particular strain of human discordia. Boys will be boys.
Gender, class, race, intellect, sexuality, did I forget anything else? Religion, but in the barest sense of the phrase. Funnel the poor into hospitals and institutions and execution chambers unless they are very, very special. Special enough to merit that special cocktail of disbelieving glee, that dumbfounded savior complex that marvels at the genius that proved too much for all kinds of systematic oppression to contain. A gate breaker, for the realm within which she was supposed to stay has no place for her, not if she insists on doing as best she can. Yes, she. I'm afraid I must emphasize that till kingdom come and all the world's a stage for all players. You can have your white boys in lace and silk and person of colorface if you like that sort of thing but it's no substitute, what with its added tax of rape culture and involuntary female circumcision (notice the involuntary) and the lot.
It's not me spinning my wheels here. Defiance splays it dressed to the nines, admittedly plunged in the swirling cacophony of thought seizing upon thought in the glory of intersection and mental blockages, but all you out there gaping for your next fix of 'difficult', that listy list of Shandy inspired and its so few women, come. Here's one reddening to rot on the vine for your perusal, and as an added bonus, I will even namedrop. Lessing, Morrison, Jelinek. You have no excuse.
Leave your despised alone for once. Your feared, your wretched, your quarantined. Your homosexuals, your African-Americans, all your others, your women, your children. Your tired, your poor. Your refuse. Leave us be. You laugh. You choose to miss the subtext. You minimize everything. Nothing but hate and fear and ignorance. We hold these truths to be self-evident.
My amoral moody aristocrats. Your wars, your drugs, your thousand assaults on the poor. War without end, amen.
My eagle scouts. My heads of state. My government.
Step right in. The water's ripe. show less
Harvard math genious prof on death row b/c S&M murder; graphic & perverse
8.98
8.98
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