I’m in the middle of the wondeful new Tom Wolfe novel. One thing that strikes me about it is how natural differences–between man and woman, the weak and the strong–reassert themselves when they’re suppressed. The older demands of civilized conduct did not require such a cleavage between nature and its refraction by the rules of civilized society. But when those realities are denied and when young people are thrown into an untutored environment of leisure, wealth, and the ordinary desire for status and companionship, a new, uglier world emerges. The untutored dictates of nature for status, respect, human companionship, and sex come out as raw energy when there is no code to channel them. And when those codes are reasserted as the legalistic restraints of university speech codes and sexual harassment tribunals, they are both potentially more harsh and infinitely more ugly than the chivalry and “good manners” they replaced.
At the same time, I do think the picture he paints is stark and exagerrated, at least compared to my own college experience at Chicago. There seemed to me a greater variety of experience and a niche in which almost anyone could fit. That said, I think it quite deliberate that the novel Madame Bovary appears so early in the book. Charlotte begins, at least, as a Charles Bovary figure: simple, countrified, and bewildered by the vulgarity around her. (Surely her name is no coincidence). But like Charles, her own purity is not strong enough to resist the world around her. A different set of skills, less pure but more resilient perhaps, are needed for her to emerge from her experience unscathed. And like Charles she may soon find that her ambitions and sense of superiority create the foundations for her own tragic downfall. I’m only halfway through, but I’ll post more complete thoughts when I’m done.
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my name is actually charlotte simons, and i am am a girl and i live in the uk