The End?

Hello fellow readers,

I’m sorry to be the one to tell the sad news, I have finished the fiction story The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur  and i’ve decided to keep the ending to myself. Hopefully this will inspire many of you to go up to Ms. Romano’s book shelf and read it for your own blogs, it is really worth it and heres why. The story is made up of a young girl wandering for a new life in a place her mother calls Gotham, she ends up working in a bar in which the top dog is named Ganz. The author makes him wise and mysterious, creepy enough that he shows fear in the narrators voice when she speaks of him. She also works with two other girls that give her the scoop on the locals, and their own problems of hard life with marriage issues. One of them which is married to Hoinck one of the main contributors to the climax of the story. But my favorite evolutionizing character is Butch, a man so strong, brave, handsome and single for the narrator. As the narrator talks about the bootleg being sold by Ganz and her emotions overwhelming her every time she sees Butch behind the bar, the author lets us in on their secret plan. To achieve Wealth and power. The plan consisted of the three men; Hoinck, Butch, and Ganz to steal money from the bank and the narrator to drive the getaway car. The narrator agreed as long as she could have as much time with her mesmerizing Butch. However not everything goes to plan, in the crossfires of betrayal and desire the unexpected happens and only two of the four come out alive. Driving into what seemed an endless road the author keeps you turning the pages detailing the pain one of the injured was going through as he talked to his girl. Butch and the narrator however did not have a happy ending in Iowa or the “South” where she thought she was headed. Whether she survived alone or with Butch back in Gotham is up to then next reader to reveal. This book has a lot of revelations with characters, a twisted theme between love and betrayal and an unexpected ending.

Why Butch?

In “The Girl” Butch one of the leading characters throughout the passage is seen as the god of all men. The still anonymous “baby” as he refers to her as makes her love for him very noticeable throughout the book. The author however made a deep change from chapter nineteen to chapter twenty three as seen here where the narrator says “then he came over to the bed and kissed me and said it was sweet” she also included, “ It was a lovely life he gave me”. It seemed that the character Butch was the change she needed in her life, the one to cause a revolution from the life the narrator was so new to. Butch however changed the role of being a hardworking charming man to a coward as seen in chapter twenty three. The transition happened as the narrator believed to be carrying the love of her life’s child. Confused as she confesses to her friend and coworker from the Village Clara that she had missed a month. Clara, old fashioned filled with life regret for not owning a cent to eat from, expresses her worries, trying to comfort her friend she insists on abortion being the right choice. She repeatedly say’s “we got to get some money, if you got a kid you got to get rid of it”. But the narrator using flashbacks to her own mother's words determined that, that was not the right choice, and although she didn’t know whether to tell Butch or not him leaving her was no option. As she enters the Tavern to speak to Butch, she scared blurts out about the kid. Upset and roaring with rage he agrees with Clara by telling the narrator, “Get rid of it. I could do it myself with a pair of scissors, there’s nothing to it”.  He soon became the irresponsible and foolish man that the narrator could not see as the man she wanted to marry some day as she said in the countryside. However this section left me wondering why the author would create a small change with the character Butch to irresponsible as the main scene of the robbery was about to happen. With the group of men including Ganz, Hoinck, Butch and the narrator looking through the alleyways and secret roads to get away. I wondered what change could this have meant? Wouldn’t a man tough enough to be able to rob a big bank be tough enough to start a new life as well? Or would it also be a form of foreshadow of downhill on the characters life?

The Girl and the "Booya"

“The Girl” by Meridel Le Sueur sets it’s setting around 1930’s and the center of life is being told in what seems to be a bar in German Village. The drinking life being oppressed by the government, now has people creating bars to have upstair bootleg rooms where people sneak in late at night and meet with a man like Ganz. The twin cities of “Sodom and Gomorrah” as the unnamed narrator's mother called them becomes the center of life for the runaway young women. It’s interesting the way life is built in the bar. The way the restaurant gets packed that five mugs are carried around like its nothing. And the way a “home run” was a thing to lookout for when taking up beer to those men that seemed to be gangsters in the upstairs room. The story unravels the main characters or Clara and Hoinck a couple, Belle a waitress and Bill the brother of the steamy Butch both what seem to be as bartenders. I got an intense feeling as the author proceeded to express the interest of the narrator towards the bar man Butch. The use of imagery like, “Butch leaned over me and I felt like a bird on a barbecue spike”. Not only made me the reader see the blush in the character but kinda giggle at the situation of the characters own reaction. It reminded me of a show called “Bomb Girls” as to where one of the characters is a runaway child and every men she likes she creates these illusions of them being muscular and handy in her head. I enjoy the fact that the author has created the a first person omniscient character. It provides insight on the thoughts and reactions on all characters even herself, kind of like a play rather than a fiction novel. I believe that the plot is not entirely showed on the first few chapters of the book however the want of a new life and beginning to the narrator creates a bit of a foreshadow. I think this is great because it leaves the reader wanting more, it creates a sense of believable life as well. The way the narrator's emotions of anxiety are expressed when she is told that Ganz wants "Booya" a famous plate at the restaurant begins to make her  shy, and creates a sense of innocence in the  character making her question her life decisions. Her nervousness tells the reader that the man named Ganz is old and gets his own way in life creating a conflict for the narrator to work at the bar because she's young and new.

In Between

In the book “Telling Women’s Lives”  Wagner Martin is trying to explain how as a writer we can become great biography writers, and as readers how to find a great biography and autobiography. However the purpose is not to teach step by step but by giving non-stop examples and showing evidence of it. On page 70 there is an example used about a character in the Lillian Hellman’s Memoirs which represents the unknown character in her lifetime. The author purposefully creates this character to confused the reader. The confusion isn’t about who the character is, or where it came from, but what it represents. Is it someone in the writer’s life? or is there fiction being created in a biography. But the real question Wagner Martin focuses on is whether fiction is allowed in a biography or not. The example of this story connects to my life existence by questioning my dreams and the meaning they have in my life. Because no one else sees them, and don’t appear in real life would it be adding fiction to your life? pretty crazy in some sense. Wagner Martin quickly changes her focus on fiction in biographies to family and reflection they show on authors biographies and autobiographies. She says, “Women are reflection of family”(page100). At first it intrigued me because it made me think about the things i’ve learned through my family but then she gave an example about another writer and it changed my concept about that phrase. She used writer Catherine Bateson and Mother Margaret Mead as a focal point for this section. Both mother and daughter write memoirs however the mother writes about her life before, during and after a divorce. Mead doesn’t write about the struggles but the passage and phases she went through because of the divorce, she tries to write out her daughters perspective without asking but just noticing. However Bateson later writes about her perspective as an adult on the situation. She goes from the guilt she felt, the shame and the sadness to the actual feeling of understanding. Both mother and daughter got the learning experiences from one life even that included them both in two different roles. I think this intrigued me because it must have been challenging for Mead to write through the eyes of her daughter and how Bateson must have felt while writing her memoir while not trying to contradict her own feelings.

The Start to the Telling.

    The book I am reading is called "Telling Women's Lives" by Linda Wagner-Martin. A pretty simple and straight forward book. The book starts on page five after the preface and introduction. I think that the organization to the book is well played considering that it starts comparing women's biographies to men's. I mean what is the similarities between a women's biography and a men's biography anyway?. The author expresses her opinion by giving an example of Henry Adam's biography that looked over his whole college and job accomplishments rather than his thirteen year marriage and grief held when his wife died. The author compares this idea to the idea that women's biographies have to be well played at every specific detail. Because its like adding sugar to a coffee if you add to much of a traumatic event, or sentimental emotions then it becomes the central characteristic of that person. I think her way of starting the book in a comparison makes the reader feel intrigued by how difficult it is to write a simple biography of another person and pushes the reader to open a whole new eye for this type of writing. I also liked how the author Linda uses the meaning of art to express her feelings on biographies. She explained on page nine just how important it is in a biography to use witnesses and other views to a situation rather than just one persons because it makes real art. The art of biographies isn't how a person accomplished something they knew they could do but how the reader perceives the struggle and real goal. The idea I took from this book and the amount of reading I did left me walking away with a new perception on human beings and their life stories. Whether its a biography or an auto-biography it makes me think twice about what it really means. I could remember of the time I researched Mae Jameson for a project and many biographies I read and think of how many of those really sucked. Because they were just facts and not real opinions about the choices she made. It was just an accomplishment list but had nothing to do with her real life. I came to that conclusion because Linda explains that we accept biographies through the way the person made the choices in their lives as well as how well we accept their struggles. In many biographies we only get to read the birth date, the place they lived and the people that influenced them the most and this shapes the identity you make in your mind about a person.