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Culture April 29, 2017
I don’t know how common this is, but quite often I find myself in the middle of two books. Sometimes I read books individually, and other times I am reading up to three books at the same time. I start the novels at different times, but they usually get finished within a week of each other. This go round I found myself reading two memoirs; “This Boy’s Life” by Tobias Wolff and “My Invented Country” by Isabel Allende.
I had been reading the two novels independently of each other and they would have remained that way in mind had I not finished them within an hour of each other. They both had the same kind of abrupt ending that gave me the impression that both writers were either pressed for time to finish their work or were just too tired of writing about their lives and eager to not have the completion of the memoir lingering on their minds. Finding this similarity between the two stories led me to start flashing through the stories and comparing them even further. First, I think it is fair to elaborate more on each memoir before I provide you with my personal analysis.
“This Boy’s Life” focuses primarily on Wolff’s teenage years. We start when he is around the age of nine and he is embarking on a cross country road trip with his mother who is leaving his father and consequentially, his brother and her son. In the 50s. After leaving an abusive boyfriend behind and hightailing it up to Washington, Wolff found himself with a new family and a new stepfather. This is where the story seems to really begin.
We learn to despise Wolff’s stepfather and appreciate his mother even more, but I myself was left with mixed feelings on Wolff himself. Coming from a broken home myself, I understand the struggles of creating your own identity while trying to come to terms with your home life. But Wolff seems to actively look for trouble, which is a mindset I have never been able to understand. Constantly lying about things such as his first name, I wondered where this habit came from and why it stuck. Was it to run away from the truth? I guess I’ll never know.
Towards the end of the novel, we embark on Wolff’s quest to leave behind his miserable life in Chinook and join the ranks of the wealthy young boys of the United States at a prep school. And how does he eventually accomplish this? He lies about who he is on his own application. He claims to have participated in such and such extracurricular, received such and such award, and pulled off impeccable grades throughout his time in high school. None of this was true, and yet he still was accepted to a prep school and never suffered the consequences of actions until his final year when he was expelled. From there, Wolff enlisted in the army and found success as a short story writer afterwards.
On the opposite end of the world, Isabel Allende was struggling to find a voice in her home country of Chile. In “My Invented Country,” she talks about her childhood in her beloved country and how her love for the mystical land has stuck with her everywhere she went. Allende grew up in a world where women were meant to only be seen and never heard, unless a man requested her input. And not once did this resonate well with her. In the memoir, she reflects on how she used to judge her mother for actively choosing to accept her role as a man’s servant.
Born in Peru, Isabel and her family were abandoned by her father at an early age, leaving her mother with a pile of debt that she could not pay off. With nowhere else to turn or go, her mother moved back in with her father, Allende’s grandfather, and tried to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. It was not long before she married again, a marriage that proved to be to everyone’s liking and has lasted to this day.
This new marriage resulted in the moving around between countries for a few years, which started her longing for Chile. Upon returning, she was not able to jump back into the swing of things just as she had hoped. Things had changed. Her friends had moved on with their lives. Being a girl, she was kept at home while her brothers were sent to school. Allende was home, but she was alone. But the ripe young age 15, Isabel fell in love for the first and what she thought would be the only time. Before she knew it, she was married with children and working.
As a child, Allende was obedient and followed the rules. She was respectful of her elders, except in times in which she was devalued for being a woman. She was seen as merely amusing for voicing her own opinions, but she was never taken seriously because of her lack of the Y chromosome. As a wife, Allende found herself being the subservient wife she never thought she would be, but it was all she knew to do. She never once lost her passion for equality among men and women.
It wasn’t long before Allende discovered her passion for writing and telling stories. She became a journalist and was enjoying mild success until the military coup of 1973. Having gotten into a bit of some trouble, Allende found herself with no option but to flee her country. Upon arriving in Venezuela and going through the end of her marriage, Allende found herself with her first novel, “The House of Spirits,” complete. She was 35.
There is more to both stories, but what I have told you are the things that started to stand out for me when I was comparing them. Something struck me about these two ridiculously unrelated stories—one was about someone who caused trouble, the other about someone who tried to stay out of it. Despite causing trouble, the former was able to almost seamlessly accomplish all that they wanted to while the latter struggled to gain acknowledgment for all that she had done. And what is the difference between these two? One is a man while the other is a woman. Now, before I go deeper in on this I should clarify that my further analysis is on society, not on the individual lives of the writers.
It goes without question that men and women are not equal. Men have had the upper hand in society for centuries upon centuries. This privilege has provided them with the ability to constantly mess up, and still be able to redeem themselves as “a good man.” Meanwhile, one slip up on behalf of a woman would tarnish her reputation forever. Wolff constantly actively makes problems for himself, and every time he would describe something he did I would become so frustrated with and confused by him. When I read about Allende’s fight for establishing her own voice, I felt like I could relate to what she had gone through. This difference in emotions evoked led to a realization that society does, in fact, favor men over women. This is not a myth that women thought up.
Women have long felt that they have to fight for a privilege that men constantly take advantage of. As most people with privilege do, men have long declared this statement to be a myth and that men by no means have more privilege than women. But the difference in tones in these two memoirs has perfectly proved men wrong. Wolff has had the privilege of being able to create his own problems, “overcome” them, and still manage to find success. Allende, on the other hand, has had to overcome the problems and obstacles that men put in her way, and be sure to make no wrong steps before she could find success.
While speaking on the important role men play in women’s rights, Dr. Michael Kimmel said, “Privilege is invisible to those who have it.” Furthermore, there is a resistance to acknowledging privilege because it requires those with privilege to step out of their comfort zone and really look at the facts. Men and women aren’t equal. Hopefully, after realizing this, men will take the position of “men and women should be equal.” After that is when things get really scary, men have to start treating women like equals and make space for them in areas they hadn’t before. This means men will lose their overbearing power, which is something most don’t want to risk. To them, this means they have lost everything and because they are only thinking of themselves, they aren’t seeing all that society is gaining.
It goes without saying that Wolff and Allende never imagined their memoirs crossing paths to support and prove that the inequality between men and women is real, but I know at least one of them would not frown at it. It is not a myth that women are automatically a few steps behind men because of their gender, it is the truth. And this is a worldwide issue. We clearly have a ways to go, but we first have to start with everyone acknowledging and understanding the truth.
