gender, maturity, and nerves

am reading a long thing about the sensation novel, nerves, and gender identity. (it says it will also be about homosexuality, but I suspect it will be rubbish before then). It reckons that all the characters are described as having problems with nerves, being nervous, having a nervous face or whatever the hell else. It reckons that women describe it as a sign of their femininity, and men as a sign of their immaturity. It concludes from that that everyone is a little bit feminine, and goes off on... oh dear, thirty pages of waffle about gender confusion in the sensation novel and how it extends to the reader, who is assumed by the novel to be male but is also made nervous and hence made feminine. However I would say that men and women are all nervous sometimes therefore in the terms set out by this book they're all a bit immature. Women aren't expected to grow out of it, hence the permanent association with femininity. But then they all do grow out of it by the end, without stopping being women. Well, some of them get dead instead, but on the whole, they get better by the end. In the main male character its a sign he went off to Be A Man and came back all Manly. Which happened because he deliberately sought out situations that could make a reasonable person nervous ie getting shot at. So the reader, assumed male or otherwise, seeks out situations that will play on their nerves, in order to get over them and get more mature. It's very tidy that way and doesn't involve gender confusion at all. Which is why you can't make an essay out of it and we have to read this rubbish instead.

ranting on the theme of Why Do We Have To Read This Rubbish

I have read 23/31 of this tedious rubbish and it is now talking about castration fantasies, where teenage males dreams of sex involve sticking it in and breaking it off so it stays there. and this somehow has to do with an umbrella and a woman's moustache. and how reading someone's diary is in fact exactly like rape.

At this point, if I could erase one person from the timeline, I think it would be Freud. The influence on lit crit is pure poison.

they're not even talking about symbols that exist in the text, they're talking about how there isn't any symbol therefore all this made up gubbins must be true.

I'm embarrassed by my topic area, really I am.

( Read more... )

Oh sod this, I'm going to go buy lunch.


ETA: I read the rest of it. It descends into utter babble, and ends by talking about the author's rib injury. Which they feel has something to do with all that Freudian garbage they've just been spouting.

Can I have those hours back?