Jessica

When a work is beautiful even in translation, it can do nothing but inspire awe... and so with this. At only 200 pages, it's a briskly-paced outline of the Chile of Isabel Allende's imagination, full of exaggeration and lyricism, and deeply absorbing. There's reminiscing about eccentric relatives, the excitement of the short-lived Unidad Popular government, the regime of fear that was Pinochet's... another element that I found interesting was the reflections on the patriarchal nature of Chilean society. In some ways it reminded me of Simone de Beauvoir, as these reflections too were coming from the perspective of a relatively upper-class woman, except that this book is better written! Ha ha.

No seriously though, there's a lot interesting in this book, and I found it so engrossing due to the way it's written. Also, it makes me really want to travel to Chile...

So I was mostly reading this for the purposes of writing an essay on how working-class women in turn-of-the-century North America experienced their sexuality, and this book is positively brilliant for learning about that. It draws extensively on primary sources (as you would hope I guess, but I digress...) and paints a vivid picture about how individuals' experiences were shaped by their class, gender and ethnic backgrounds.

One aspect I found particularly interesting was the phenomenon of “treating”, by which working-class women would expect their male companions to pay the cost of an outing, their entertainment needs, etc. - and frequently certain other costs as well, like for clothes and shoes. It seems that there was a kind of continuum from this behaviour, through casual prostitution, to “fully-fledged” prostitution... and as someone who cares passionately about women's oppression, I am vehemently opposed to the existence of that industry. However, the practice of “treating” seems to have been qualitatively different, a far more liberating practice which ascribed far more agency to the woman involved. Which is not to say that working women in the 1910s were all sexually free and liberated - far from it! - as Peiss describes, women's wages were so low (below the living wage of the time) that they were economically dependent on men, which pressured them into this behaviour of course. BUT it ALSO means that many working women (although by no means all... again, this tended to vary by things like ethnic background) were able to experiment sexually, flirting and fooling around with boys etc., at a time when this would have (and did...) completely scandalised bourgeois moralists.

In the last chapter, chapter seven, Peiss describes how bourgeois women tried to create some kind of cross-class solidarity among women. I found this interesting because it seems to me that Peiss, as a feminist, really sympathises with these bourgeois reformers' aims, but working women of the time evidently did not! Working-class women, by and large, identified with the men of their own class before the women of the bourgeoisie; they resented bourgeois women's individualism and identified with the labour struggle instead (if they were political) and even if they were not, they preferred to mingle with men - and enjoyed the freer sexual culture of the working class - to stuffy, stultifying notions of respectability.

In all honesty, this was a really fun book to read - and short too! Goodreads claims it's 288 pages, but the copy I read is more like 188, plus endnotes and index etc. - and if you are even remotely interested in sexual liberation or women's oppression (particularly if you, like me, want to research this entire topic in the first place because most studies of women's sexuality ignore working-class women entirely) THIS IS A MUST-READ. I am not even kidding.

This collection of letters is so intricate and detailed, and I feel like out of them you get a deep understanding of the writer of most of them, Maimie. It's amazing to me that in spite of all of the disadvantages she faced – she's a working-class woman, an immigrant, disabled, with a past seemingly full of unending tragedy – she refused to play the victim and kept striving and striving to improve her situation, those of those around her, and those of those like her.

There are a lot of individual aspects of these letters that I could pull out and comment on, but I shall try to resist the temptation! However, writing my research essay on them should be fun.

Basically this is an outline of various historiographical traditions (and all the major historians in the field) with regards to sexuality... I had to read it for class. It was really useful. Also, like the unit in general, made me think about lots of aspects of sexuality that had never really crossed my mind before.

I didn't actually read ALL of it but I'm putting it on the “read” shelf anyway because I read enough and I don't think I'm going to read the rest (seeing as that'd involve re-borrowing it from the library). Also sorry about the inarticulacy of this “review”; I'm sick...

I read this because it had been recommended to me, and because I wanted something easy and undemanding to read. The novel delivered on that!

It took me a very long time to warm up to the characters, or to care particularly about what was happening to them, but by the time I got to the endgame of the book I found that some kind of connection had developed, because I would screw my face up and flinch at everything that wasn't going according to plan. The narrative is written in the present tense, from a first-person perspective, which helps make things visceral and immediate. Or so I found by the end, anyway.

There were a couple of things that irritated me during the book – firstly, it relies a lot on Christian lore, which I'm not very knowledgeable about. In particular, agnosticism is depicted as a weird or unreasonable perspective to have, which is logical given the premise of the book, and so it wasn't a BIG deal to me, but it made me a bit uncomfortable at times. Secondly, there is a vague kind of romantic subplot in this book which wasn't really working for me, which I would like to chalk up to the hormones of the seventeen-year-old protagonist, but I guess we shall see.

Overall though, the novel is quite readable, with very short, bite-sized chapters so it's easy to read a little bit at a time in any five-minute break. If the premise intrigues you, the novel shouldn't let you down!

I read this novel years ago for school, but I was clicking around Goodreads randomly and I realised that, for some bizarre reason, this book has a lot of positive reviews, so I thought I'd try to counterbalance that a little.

This book made me really angry. For a start, it's just so boring – you'd think it'd be easy to avoid putting too much padding in a 109-page novella, but no, this book will do such things as devote an entire page to describing a tree, and honestly, I do not care about trees that much. So. That happens.

But worse, I despised the plot. Basically what happens is this: a woman in sixteenth-century France marries this man, Martin Guerre, who is abusive and generally a despicable person. At some point he up and leaves her, which would seem to me to be the highlight of their entire marriage, except for the part where this leaves her in a precarious position in sixteenth-century France. Eight years later, Martin Guerre finally deigns to return, only now he's much kinder and warmer, a really nice guy, someone it wouldn't be hell on earth to live with. This means Bertrande (the woman) becomes convinced that he's not really Martin Guerre at all, but an impostor. Most of the rest of the book is then about her struggle to make everyone else realise he's an impostor, even though he's clearly a vast improvement on the man she was married to before, so I personally would be very inclined to bury my doubts.

Then at the end he's proved to be an impostor because the real Martin Guerre actually returns, and promptly abuses Bertrande anew to thank her for making the impostor's life as hard as possible in spite of what a great guy he was. Oh sorry, I mean for "cheating" on him. Because he was definitely entitled to her loyalty after being abusive and abandoning her, after all.

I mean, I do hate novels where characters seem anachronistic, and my teacher at the time gave me a lecture about how I just didn't understand how deep the fear of hell ran in Bertrande's time. But quite honestly, I think this depth of fear of hell would have been equally unusual in Bertrande's time as ours. In the last millennium, Europe has been full of people who had affairs or even, god forbid, sex before marriage - and this is a guy who could quite easily have been Bertrande's true husband, just a bit more mature and with an actual conscience. So fine, Bertrande is part of that small minority of people who actually think remaining loyal to an abusive husband is better than the possibility of eternal damnation. This is not really a segment of society I care to read about. Each to their own, though.