I want to write something about the "Free Radicals" story, yet I'm not entirely sure what. This story obviously fit into the "when a stranger comes to town" archetype, so I'm not sure what to say about that. I do have a question though, and hopefully it will be brought up in class. I have NO idea what the whole "poisoning the girl my husband was sleeping with" thing was about. I get that Nita pretended to be Bett, but I wasn't sure whether Bett had actually attempted to poison Nita (and Nita found out about it), or whether Nita just thought that if she had been Bett, she would have tried to poison the person putting her marriage in danger. Any clarifications on this?
Also, Is it weird that I connected the guy with (ah I forget his name...if there was a name) the guy in O'Connor's story where the guy marries the girl for the car and ends up leaving her. I know that is pure coincidence, but I think this story is somewhat O'Connor-esque (if that's a word I can make up). However, I don't think that O'Connor would kill him in a car crash. She would probably have let him go on living...or at least never tell us what happened to him. Does anyone agree/disagree?
Tags: Chelsea Oaks, O'Connor, Short story
4 Comments:
-
- Chelsea Lane said...
February 28, 2008 at 12:29 PMThis comment has been removed by the author.- Chelsea Lane said...
February 28, 2008 at 12:29 PMI totally agree. Things would not have wrapped up so neatly between Nita and the Stranger if O'Connor had written it. That isn't to say that things wrapped up neatly, though. I don't think they did. It's just that the messy part (the situation between Nita and Bett) was exposed through the Stranger.- Josie said...
February 28, 2008 at 1:06 PMI also agree that O'Connor wouldn't have killed off the stranger; his is much too important in the story. Although I also feel that this story is O'Connor-esque, I think it mainly just comes from the fact that a stranger comes to town and not much else. Maybe this is because, it is the stranger, rather than Nita, who dies and if this were an O'Connor story, I seems to me that it would be the other way around.- Neena said...
March 3, 2008 at 7:41 PMI kinda already said this in my blog, but I think Nita had to become Bett, in a sense, in order to take on or confront the intruder. See, Bett is a woman who places herself on the same level as her husband -- publishing a book, stepping up on a ladder, building with him, and leaving him when he cheats. Nita stepped down from her job at the suggestion she do so, did not inherit the carpenter's apron, she "had played the younger woman, the happy home-wrecker, the lissome, laughing, tripping ingenue." It seems that when the intruder comes, she has to step up to his level, or become his equal, in order to confront her own diffidence. It gets into that realm of psychology I'm not sure I understand, but ita almost like she must kill that part of herself that is weak or insecure and needs protection. Anyway, I hope we have a chance to talk a little bit about this in class too.