Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Maybe it was because there was so little to do in Welch; maybe it was because life there was hard and it made people hard; maybe it was because of all the bloody battles over unionizing the mines; maybe it was because mining was dangerous and cramped and dirty work and it put all the miners in bad moods and they came home and took it out on their wives, who took it out on their kids, who took it out on other kids. Whatever the reason, it seemed that just about everyone in Welch—men, women, boys, girls—liked to fight. There were street brawls, bar stabbings, parking-lot beatings, wife slappings, and toddler whalings. Sometimes it was simply a matter of someone throwing a stray punch, and it would all be over before you knew it had started. Other times it would be more like a twelve-round prizefight, with spectators cheering on the bloody, sweating opponents. Then there were the grudges and feuds that went on for years, a couple of brothers beating up some guy because back in the fifties his father had beaten up their father, a woman shooting her best friend for sleeping with her husband and the best friend’s brother then stabbing the husband. You’d walk down McDowell Street, and half the people you passed seemed to be nursing an injury sustained in local combat. There were shiners, split lips, swollen cheekbones, bruised arms, scraped knuckles, and bitten earlobes. We had lived in some pretty scrappy places back in the desert, but Mom said Welch was the fightingest town she’d ever seen. Brian and Lori and Maureen and I got into more fights than most kids. Dinitia Hewitt and her friends were only the first in a whole line of little gangs who did battle with one or more of us. Other kids wanted to fight us because we had red hair, because Dad was a drunk, because we wore rags and didn’t take as many baths as we should have, because we lived in a falling-down house that was partly painted yellow and had a pit filled with garbage, because they’d go by our dark house at night and see that we couldn’t even afford electricity. But we always fought back, usually as a team. Our most spectacular fight, and our most audacious tactical victory—the Battle of Little Hobart Street—took place against Ernie Goad and his friends when I was ten and Brian was nine. Ernie Goad was a pug-nosed, thick-necked kid who had little eyes set practically on the sides of his head, like a whale. He acted as if it was his sworn mission to drive the Walls family out of town. It started one day when I was playing with some other kids on the tank parked next to the armory. Ernie Goad appeared and began throwing rocks at me and yelling that the Wallses should all leave Welch because we were stinking it up so bad.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  It might start with Mom mentioning how short we were on cash. Then Grandma would make a snide comment about Dad being shiftless. Dad would say something about selfish old crones with more money than they knew what to do with, and soon enough they’d be face-to-face in what amounted to a full-fledged cussing contest. “You flea-bitten drunk!” Grandma would scream. “You goddamned flint-faced hag!” Dad would shout back. “You no-good two-bit pud-sucking bastard!” “You scaly castrating banshee bitch!” Dad had the more inventive vocabulary, but Grandma Smith could outshout him; plus, she had the home-court advantage. A time would come when Dad had had enough and he’d tell us kids to get in the car. Grandma would yell at Mom not to let that worthless horse’s ass take her grandchildren. Mom would shrug and say there was nothing she could do about it, he was her husband. Off we’d go, heading out into the desert in search of another house for rent in another little mining town. Some of the people who lived in those towns had been there for years. Others were rootless, like us—just passing through. They were gamblers or ex-cons or war veterans or what Mom called loose women. There were old prospectors, their faces wrinkled and brown from the sun, like dried-up apples. The kids were lean and hard, with calluses on their hands and feet. We’d make friends with them, but not close friends, because we knew we’d be moving on sooner or later. We might enroll in school, but not always. Mom and Dad did most of our teaching. Mom had us all reading books without pictures by the time we were five, and Dad taught us math. He also taught us the things that were really important and useful, like how to tap out Morse code and how we should never eat the liver of a polar bear because all the vitamin A in it could kill us. He showed us how to aim and fire his pistol, how to shoot Mom’s bow and arrows, and how to throw a knife by the blade so that it landed in the middle of a target with a satisfying thwock. By the time I was four, I was pretty good with Dad’s pistol, a big black six-shot revolver, and could hit five out of six beer bottles at thirty paces. I’d hold the gun with both hands, sight down the barrel, and squeeze the trigger slowly and smoothly until, with a loud clap, the gun kicked and the bottle exploded. It was fun. Dad said my sharpshooting would come in handy if the feds ever surrounded us. Mom had grown up in the desert. She loved the dry, crackling heat, the way the sky at sunset looked like a sheet of fire, and the overwhelming emptiness and severity of all that open land that had once been a huge ocean bed. Most people had trouble surviving in the desert, but Mom thrived there.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  This man was the very flower of learning, as the old books tell us, and he managed to impart to his pupil all the lessons of civility. Nero then was compliant and obedient. He hid his vices very well. The teacher’s name was Seneca. He ruled over Nero with words rather than deeds. He did not punish him, but he reproved wrongdoing. ‘Sir,’ he would say, ‘a good emperor must love virtue and hate tyranny.’ What was his reward? Nero ordered that the wrists of Seneca should be slit as he lay in a bath. Nero hated any authority placed over him. In particular he always felt a grievance against Seneca. So the philosopher chose to die in the bath, his blood in the water, rather than endure any more grievous punishment. That is the way the emperor slaughtered him. There came a time, however, when Dame Fortune no longer favoured Nero. She detested his pride. And she knew, even though he was strong, that she was stronger. ‘I cannot allow this vicious man to glory in his power and wickedness. I will throw him from the emperor’s throne and, when he least expects it, he will suffer a great fall.’ One night the people of Rome rose up against him. When he learned of the revolt he ran out of the palace and looked for allies among his confederates. But their doors were closed to him. He knocked upon their gates, and cried for help, but they did not listen. He knew then that it was over. He stopped crying out, and went on his lonely way. The uproar of the people continued. There were shouts and oaths resounding through the streets, and Nero could hear them asking one another: ‘Where is that false tyrant? Where is Nero?’ He was almost out of his mind with fear. He prayed to his heathen gods for help, but of course they could not assist him. He knew that he was about to die, and he ran into a nearby garden to hide himself. There he found two peasants, sitting around a large bonfire. He begged and pleaded with these two men to kill him and to cut off his head. He did not want to be recognized and shamefully mutilated after his death. Then he killed himself in front of them. He had no choice. Dame Fortune looked down, and laughed at his fate. Holofernes Behold Holofernes, the general of Nebuchadnezzar. There was no king’s soldier more famous or more victorious. There was no one stronger in battle. There was no one more filled with pride and presumption. Fortune kissed him, fondled him and then led him to a place where his head was cut off. It happened before he knew it. For the sake of their wealth, and their liberty, men held him in fearful respect; he made his enemies renounce their faith. ‘Nebuchadnezzar is your god,’ he told them.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  The way I saw it, Dad owed me. I’d looked after his kids all summer, I’d kept him in beer and cigarette money, and I’d helped him fleece that miner Robbie. I figured I had Dad in my back pocket. When I got home from school that afternoon, Mom was still curled up on the sofa bed, a small pile of paperbacks next to her. Dad was sitting at the drafting table, rolling a cigarette. He beckoned to me to follow him into the kitchen. Mom watched us go. Dad closed the door and looked at me gravely. “Your mother claims you back-talked her.” “Yes,” I said. “It’s true.” “Yes, sir,” he corrected me, but I didn’t say anything. “I’m disappointed in you,” he went on. “You know damn good and well that you are to respect your parents.” “Dad, Mom’s not sick, she’s playing hooky,” I said. “She has to take her obligations more seriously. She has to grow up a little.” “Who do you think you are?” he asked. “She’s your mother.” “Then why doesn’t she act like one?” I looked at Dad for what felt like a very long moment. Then I blurted out, “And why don’t you act like a dad?” I could see the blood surge into his face. He grabbed me by the arm. “You apologize for that comment!” “Or what?” I asked. Dad shoved me up against the wall. “Or by God I’ll show you who’s boss around here.” His face was inches from mine. “What are you going to do to punish me?” I asked. “Stop taking me to bars?” Dad drew back his hand as if to smack me. “You watch your mouth, young lady. I can still whip your butt, and don’t think I won’t.” “You can’t be serious,” I said. Dad dropped his hand. He pulled his belt out of the loops on his work pants and wrapped it a couple of times around his knuckles. “Apologize to me and to your mother,” he said. “No.” Dad raised the belt. “Apologize.” “No.” “Then bend over.” Dad was standing between me and the door. There was no way out except through him. But it never occurred to me to either run or fight. The way I saw it, he was in a tighter spot than I was. He had to back down, because if he sided with Mom and gave me a whipping, he would lose me forever. We stared at each other. Dad seemed to be waiting for me to drop my eyes, to apologize and tell him I was wrong so we could go back to being like we were, but I kept holding his gaze. Finally, to call his bluff, I turned around, bent over slightly, and rested my hands on my knees. I expected him to turn and walk away, but there were six stinging blows on the backs of my thighs, each accompanied by a whistle of air.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Mom thought it was superficial to worry about how you looked. She said God thought the same way, so she’d go to church in torn or paint-splattered clothes. It was your inner spirit and not your outward appearance that mattered, she said, and come hymn time, she showed the whole congregation her spirit, belting out the words in such a powerful voice that people in the pews in front of us would turn around and stare. Church was particularly excruciating when Dad came along. Dad had been raised Baptist, but he didn’t like religion and didn’t believe in God. He believed in science and reason, he said, not superstition and voodoo. But Mom had refused to have children unless Dad agreed to raise them as Catholics and to attend church himself on holy days of obligation. Dad sat in the pew fuming and shifting around and trying to bite his tongue while the priest carried on about Jesus resurrecting Lazarus from the dead and the communicants filed up to eat the body and drink the blood of Christ. Finally, when Dad was unable to stand it any longer, he’d shout out something to challenge the priest. He didn’t do it to be hostile. He hollered out his point in a friendly tone: “Yo, Padre!” he’d say. The priest usually ignored Dad and tried to go on with his sermon, but Dad persisted. He’d challenge the priest about the scientific impossibility of the miracles, and when the priest continued to ignore him, he’d get mad and yell out something about Pope Alexander VI’s bastard children, or Pope Leo X’s hedonism, or Pope Nicholas III’s simony, or the murders committed in the name of the Church during the Spanish Inquisition. But what could you expect, he’d say, from an institution run by celibate men who wore dresses. At that point the ushers would tell us we’d have to leave. “Don’t worry, God understands,” Mom said. “He knows that your father is a cross we must bear.” CITY LIFE WAS GETTING to Dad. “I’m starting to feel like a rat in a maze,” he told me. He hated the way everything in Phoenix was so organized, with time cards, bank accounts, telephone bills, parking meters, tax forms, alarm clocks, PTA meetings, and pollsters knocking on the door and prying into your affairs. He hated all the people who lived in air-conditioned houses with the windows permanently sealed, and drove air-conditioned cars to nine-to-five jobs in air-conditioned office buildings that he said were little more than gussied-up prisons. Just the sight of those people on their way to work made him feel hemmed in and itchy. He began complaining that we were all getting too soft, too dependent on creature comforts, and that we were losing touch with the natural order of the world. Dad missed the wilderness. He needed to be roaming free in open country and living among untamed animals.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  But there is an old saying, proven many times, that ‘Fields have eyes and woods have ears.’ It behoves all of you to behave wisely, because you never know whom you are going to meet. The course of life is unexpected. So Palamon little knew that the voice he heard was that of Arcite. He just lay very still in the obscure grove. Meanwhile Arcite was singing his heart out, wandering among the trees and bushes of the wood. Then he stopped suddenly and fell to musing, as lovers will often do. One minute the lover dallies among flowers and the next he is thrust upon thorns. He goes up and down, just like a bucket in a well. Venus, like her day, can change her countenance - Friday can be sunny and then filled with clouds. Friday is unlike any other day of the week. In the same way Venus is quixotic and unpredictable with her votaries. So after Arcite had sung, he sighed. He sat down upon the trunk of an upturned tree, and began to mourn. ‘Alas,’ he cried, ‘I wish that I had never been born! How long, cruel and pitiless Juno, will you continue to wage war upon Thebes? The royal blood of Cadmus and Amphion, the founders of Thebes, has been sprinkled and spilled. Cadmus was the first king of Thebes. I am of his direct lineage. Yet what has become of me? I am now no better than a slave, or a captive, serving as a squire in the court of the most bitter enemy of our city. Yet Juno heaps ever more shame upon me. I dare not acknowledge my own name. I cannot proclaim myself as noble Arcite. I must hide under the name of the insignificant Philostratus. Oh Juno, and your ruthless son, Mars, you two have destroyed my kith and kin. The only survivors are myself and Palamon, who is now consigned by Theseus to the martyrdom of endless prison. And then, above all else, I am also a martyr. I am a martyr to love. Love has fired its arrow into my heart. My heart is gone before my life is done. I believe that I was destined to this fate before I was born. The eyes of Emily have slain me utterly. They are the warrant of my death. Nothing else in the world is of any consequence to me. Nothing else has meaning for me. Oh Emily, if only I could serve you!’ And, with this, he fell down in a trance. He lay face down for a long time before getting to his feet again. Palamon, concealed close by, had heard every word of Arcite’s love lament. He felt that a sword, as cold as ice, had been plunged into his heart. He shook with anger. He could no longer stay in hiding. So, like a madman, pale as death, he jumped out of the thicket shouting, ‘Arcite! Arcite! Wicked Arcite! False traitor, Arcite!

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘What else is there to say? At the end of the month, Jankyn was my new husband. We had a grand wedding. I gave him all my worldly goods, inherited from the previous four husbands. That is what marriage is all about. But, God, did I regret doing it! He was hard. He never let me do what I wanted. And he did beat me. Once I accidentally tore a page out of his book, and he went for me. He bashed me around the head so much that I became deaf in one ear. I still am. Yet I was stubborn. I was a lioness. And I had a loose tongue, too. He told me not to gossip in the neighbourhood, but I paid no attention to him. I still made my visits to Alison and the other dames. So then he began to preach at me, and cite all the ancient examples. There was one old Roman called Simplicius Gallus - I think that was his name - who left his wife for ever. What was her crime? One day he saw her standing on the doorstep with her head uncovered. Then there was another Roman who left his wife because she went to a midsummer revel without his permission. Can you believe it? Of course he quoted the Bible at me, too. He would recite that passage from Ecclesiastes which forbids men from letting their wives roam abroad. Then he would tell me this in a solemn voice: “A man cannot build a house with reeds. A man cannot ride a blind horse. It is even more foolish to have a wife that longs to go on pilgrimages. Such a man deserves to be hanged.” What was I supposed to make of that? I made nothing of it. I ignored him. I despised his old sayings and proverbs. I was not going to be corrected by him. I hate anyone who tells me what my vices are. I’m sure that you all feel the same. This really made him mad, of course. But I was not going to put up with his whining.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Maybe it was because there was so little to do in Welch; maybe it was because life there was hard and it made people hard; maybe it was because of all the bloody battles over unionizing the mines; maybe it was because mining was dangerous and cramped and dirty work and it put all the miners in bad moods and they came home and took it out on their wives, who took it out on their kids, who took it out on other kids. Whatever the reason, it seemed that just about everyone in Welch—men, women, boys, girls—liked to fight. There were street brawls, bar stabbings, parking-lot beatings, wife slappings, and toddler whalings. Sometimes it was simply a matter of someone throwing a stray punch, and it would all be over before you knew it had started. Other times it would be more like a twelve-round prizefight, with spectators cheering on the bloody, sweating opponents. Then there were the grudges and feuds that went on for years, a couple of brothers beating up some guy because back in the fifties his father had beaten up their father, a woman shooting her best friend for sleeping with her husband and the best friend’s brother then stabbing the husband. You’d walk down McDowell Street, and half the people you passed seemed to be nursing an injury sustained in local combat. There were shiners, split lips, swollen cheekbones, bruised arms, scraped knuckles, and bitten earlobes. We had lived in some pretty scrappy places back in the desert, but Mom said Welch was the fightingest town she’d ever seen. Brian and Lori and Maureen and I got into more fights than most kids. Dinitia Hewitt and her friends were only the first in a whole line of little gangs who did battle with one or more of us. Other kids wanted to fight us because we had red hair, because Dad was a drunk, because we wore rags and didn’t take as many baths as we should have, because we lived in a falling-down house that was partly painted yellow and had a pit filled with garbage, because they’d go by our dark house at night and see that we couldn’t even afford electricity. But we always fought back, usually as a team. Our most spectacular fight, and our most audacious tactical victory—the Battle of Little Hobart Street—took place against Ernie Goad and his friends when I was ten and Brian was nine. Ernie Goad was a pug-nosed, thick-necked kid who had little eyes set practically on the sides of his head, like a whale. He acted as if it was his sworn mission to drive the Walls family out of town. It started one day when I was playing with some other kids on the tank parked next to the armory. Ernie Goad appeared and began throwing rocks at me and yelling that the Wallses should all leave Welch because we were stinking it up so bad.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  No one else must learn our secrets.’ So the silly priest obeyed him, got rid of the servant, and closed the door. Then they set to work. At the bidding of the false canon he put the crucible on the burning coals, and blew upon the fire with all his might. Then the canon sprinkled some white powder into the crucible. I don’t know what it was - chalk, powdered glass, something like that. Whatever it was, it was worthless. It was only there to fool the priest. The canon told him to pile up the coals. ‘In token of the great love I bear you,’ he said, ‘I will show you how your own two hands can work the miracle.’ ‘God save you! A thousand thanks!’ replied the priest, who was now busily stoking up the fire. While he was occupied, the false canon - this foul wretch, this servant of the devil - took out from his sleeve a piece of charcoal made of beechwood. A little hole had been drilled in the side of this coal, which the canon had filled up with metal filings; he had then sealed the hole with wax, so that none of the silver could escape. He had made this device a few hours before, and had brought it with him. I will tell you later what other tools he carried with him to deceive his victim. He wanted to rob the priest of everything before he left him. It angers me when I talk about him. I want to catch him. I want to trap him. But he is here and there and everywhere. He is so various. He is as fluid as quicksilver itself. Now listen carefully to what followed. He hid the hollow coal in his hand while the priest was bent over the fire. ‘Dear friend,’ he said, ‘you are doing

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  So, weeping like a child that has just been whipped, he crossed the street and made his way towards the shop of a blacksmith called Gervase. Gervase forged the equipment for ploughs - that sort of thing - and just at that moment was working on a ploughshare for one of the local farmers. So Absolon knocked on the door and called out, ‘Open the door, Gervase! Hurry up!’ ‘What? Who’s there?’ ‘It’s me. Absolon.’ ‘What in God’s name are you doing here so early? What’s the matter? Oh. I know. Some young madame has got you all excited. You rise early. You know what I mean.’ Absolon was not bothered by these sly insinuations. He had no time for joking. He had other matters on his mind. ‘I can see that hot blade in the corner of the chimney,’ he said to Gervase. ‘It’s for a ploughshare, isn’t it? Can I borrow it from you for a few minutes? I won’t need it for long.’ ‘Of course you can. I would do anything for an old friend like you. You could borrow it if it were made of gold or worth a sack of sovereigns. But what on earth do you need it for?’ ‘That depends. I’ll tell you all about it later.’ Then he picked up the blade - its handle was cool by now - and left the smithy. He made his way quickly to the carpenter’s house and stood outside the window once more. He coughed softly, just like before, and knocked. ‘Who’s there?’ Alison called out. ‘Are you a thief or what?’ ‘No, dear Alison,’ he said. ‘It is me again. Your darling Absolon. I’ve brought with me a gold ring. My mother gave it to me many years ago. It is of the purest gold, and engraved with a true love knot. I would like to give it you. In exchange for another kiss.’ Nicholas was out of bed and just about to take a piss. He thought that he could make the joke even funnier if he changed places with Alison and stuck his own arse out of the window. So he quickly went over to the window and thrust out his buttocks as far as he could. Absolon called out ‘Speak to me, my little bird. I can’t see you, sweetheart.’ And, at that, Nicholas let out a fart as loud as a peal of thunder. What a noise! What a smell! You can guess what Absolon did next. He steadied the hot blade, and thrust it right up Nicholas’s arse. Oh dear. He took the skin off that fundament, and all around the edges. Nicholas was in such pain that he thought he might die, and screamed out in agony like a madman, ‘Help! Water! For God’s sake! Water!’ Now his cries awoke the carpenter, and when he heard the exclamation ‘Water!’ he started up.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Only thing is, as I been telling you, he was a goddamn fake.” For years, every time Mom brought out Shakespeare’s plays, Dad would carry on about how they’d been written not by William Shakespeare of Avon but by a bunch of people, including someone named the Earl of Oxford, because no single person in Elizabethan England could have had Shakespeare’s thirty-thousand-word vocabulary. All this bunk about little Billy Shakespeare, Dad would say, the great genius despite his grammar-school education, his small Latin and less Greek, was a lot of sentimental mythology. “You’re helping perpetuate this fraud,” he told Lori. “Dad, it’s just a bust,” Lori said. “That’s the problem,” Dad said. He studied the sculpture, then suddenly reached over and smeared off Shakespeare’s mouth with his thumb. “What the hell are you doing?” Lori cried out. “It’s no longer just a bust,” Dad said. “Now it has symbolic value. You can call it Mute Bard .” “I spent days on that,” Lori shouted. “And you’ve ruined it!” “I elevated it,” Dad said. He told Lori he would help her write a paper that would demonstrate that Shakespeare’s plays had multiple authors, like Rembrandt’s paintings. “By God, you’ll set the literary world on edge,” he said. “I don’t want to set the world on edge!” Lori screamed. “I just want to win a stupid little scholarship!” “Goddammit, you’re in a horse race, but you’re thinking like a sheep,” Dad said. “Sheep don’t win horse races.” • • • Lori didn’t have the spirit to rework the bust. The next day she smushed the clay into a big glob and left it on the drafting table. I told Lori that if she hadn’t been accepted into an art school by the time she graduated, she should go to New York anyway. She could support herself with the money we’d saved up until she found a job, and then she could apply to a school. That became our new plan. Everyone was mad at Dad, which gave him a case of the sulks. He said he didn’t know why he even bothered to come home anymore, since he no longer got the slightest bit of appreciation for his ideas. He insisted he wasn’t trying to keep Lori from leaving for New York, but if she had the sense that God gave a goose, she would stay put. “New York is a sorry-ass sinkhole,” he said more than once, “filled with faggots and rapists.” She’d get mugged and find herself on the streets, he warned, forced into prostitution and winding up a drug addict like all those runaway teenagers. “I’m only telling you this because I love you,” he said. “And I don’t want to see you hurt.” One evening in May, when we’d been saving our money for almost nine months, I came home with a couple of dollars I’d made babysitting and went into the bedroom to stash them in Oz. The pig was not on the old sewing machine.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Theseus swore an oath that he would wreak such fatal vengeance on Creon that all the people of Greece would concur that the tyrant had met a prompt and welcome death at the hands of the ruler of Athens. This was his pledge. All at once, without any delay, he mounted his steed; then he unfurled his banner and led his army towards the city of Thebes. He vowed that he would not return to Athens, or linger for even half a day, until he had defeated Creon. He took the precaution of sending Hippolita, his new bride, and her beautiful younger sister, Emily, to take up residence in Athens. Meanwhile he spent his first night on the road rather than in his marital bed. There is no more to say. The weapons of his army glittered in the fields about Thebes. On the great white banner of Theseus was embroidered the red image of Mars, god of war and king of combat, with his spear and shield held aloft. Beside the banner was the pennant of Theseus, curiously wrought of gold; it depicted the head of the Minotaur, whom he had killed in the labyrinth of Crete. Death to all monsters! So rode the duke, so travelled the conqueror, with the flower of chivalry all around him. In majesty he came up to the gates of Thebes and alighted there; then he arrayed his troops in the field where he expected to do battle. I do not want to embarrass the ladies with accounts of the fighting. I will be brief. In combat Theseus killed Creon, according to the knightly book of arms, and put his army to flight. Then he stormed the town, and tore down its walls; not a beam or rafter was left in place. It was a just punishment. He restored to the ladies the corpses of their husbands, although little was left of them except the bones. Still they could now be dispatched with due form and order. It would be too harrowing to report all the tears and cries and laments of the ladies when they saw the remains of their husbands burning on the funeral pyres. It is enough to say that Theseus, the illustrious conqueror, paid great honour and courtesy to them before they left for their respective cities. After Theseus had killed Creon and captured Thebes, he stayed with his troops in the field. They still had work to accomplish in the conquered kingdom. There was pillaging to do. The dead soldiers of Thebes lay in heaps upon the ground, and the Athenians began systematically to strip them of their armour and their clothing. The pillagers did their work with diligence, searching all those defeated in battle for anything of value. There is now a turn in the tale. Among the piles of the dead the Athenians found two young knights, lying side by side, as if they had fought valiantly together.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The power Wittig accords to this “system” of language is enormous. Concepts, categories, and abstractions, she argues, can effect a physical and material violence against the bodies they claim to organize and interpret: “There is nothing abstract about the power that sciences and theories have to act materially and actually upon our bodies and minds, even if the discourse that produces it is abstract. It is one of the forms of domination, its very expression, as Marx said. I would say, rather, one of its exercises. All of the oppressed know this power and have had to deal with it.”32 The power of language to work on bodies is both the cause of sexual oppression and the way beyond that oppression. Language works neither magically nor inexorably: “there is a plasticity of the real to language: language has a plastic action upon the real.”33 Language assumes and alters its power to act upon the real through locutionary acts, which, repeated, become entrenched practices and, ultimately, institutions. The asymmetrical structure of language that identifies the subject who speaks for and as the universal with the male and identifies the female speaker as “particular” and “interested” is in no sense intrinsic to particular languages or to language itself. These asymmetrical positions cannot be understood to follow from the “nature” of men or women, for, as Beauvoir established, no such “nature” exists: “One must understand that men are not born with a faculty for the universal and that women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics.”34

• From City of Night (1963)

  Randy and I sat at a table, near the jukebox—its bright colors splashing courageously into the dark bar. Suddenly Randy said bitterly: “That fuckin Lance! Why doesnt he go away and stay away, or die—anything; just so I wont hear about him any more, wont know hes even around.” He removes the sunglasses, squints at the people at the bar, puts the glasses on disgustedly. “Same fuckin faces, night after night. Man, if I pin the scene with you, you can still get out before it’s too late. And I dont give a damn how cool you think you are, youll get Caught and get Caught royal. Shit, man, I wasnt queer when I came on this scene. Sure, I’d make it with the fruits, take whatever I could from them—but I wouldnt put out.... Then I met that fucker Lance.... But I got one big satisfaction: If that son of a bitch had stuck with me at Laguna, he wouldntve got into that mess. Thats what that silly nellyass queen was coming on about when we came in.”

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  If gender differentiation follows upon the incest taboo and the prior taboo on homosexuality, then “becoming” a gender is a laborious process of becoming naturalized, which requires a differentiation of bodily pleasures and parts on the basis of gendered meanings. Pleasures are said to reside in the penis, the vagina, and the breasts or to emanate from them, but such descriptions correspond to a body which has already been constructed or naturalized as gender-specific. In other words, some parts of the body become conceivable foci of pleasure precisely because they correspond to a normative ideal of a gender-specific body. Pleasures are in some sense determined by the melancholic structure of gender whereby some organs are deadened to pleasure, and others brought to life. Which pleasures shall live and which shall die is often a matter of which serve the legitimating practices of identity formation that take place within the matrix of gender norms. 42 Transsexuals often claim a radical discontinuity between sexual pleasures and bodily parts. Very often what is wanted in terms of pleasure requires an imaginary participation in body parts, either appendages or orifices, that one might not actually possess, or, similarly, pleasure may require imagining an exaggerated or diminished set of parts. The imaginary status of desire, of course, is not restricted to the transsexual identity; the phantasmatic nature of desire reveals the body not as its ground or cause, but as its occasion and its object. The strategy of desire is in part the transfiguration of the desiring body itself. Indeed, in order to desire at all it may be necessary to believe in an altered bodily ego 43 which, within the gendered rules of the imaginary, might fit the requirements of a body capable of desire. This imaginary condition of desire always exceeds the physical body through or on which it works. Always already a cultural sign, the body sets limits to the imaginary meanings that it occasions, but is never free of an imaginary construction. The fantasized body can never be understood in relation to the body as real; it can only be understood in relation to another culturally instituted fantasy, one which claims the place of the “literal” and the “real.” The limits to the “real” are produced within the naturalized heterosexualization of bodies in which physical facts serve as causes and desires reflect the inexorable effects of that physicality. The conflation of desire with the real—that is, the belief that it is parts of the body, the “literal” penis, the “literal” vagina, which cause pleasure and desire—is precisely the kind of literalizing fantasy characteristic of the syndrome of melancholic heterosexuality. The disavowed homosexuality at the base of melancholic heterosexuality reemerges as the self-evident anatomical facticity of sex, where “sex” designates the blurred unity of anatomy, “natural identity,” and “natural desire.” The loss is denied and incorporated, and the genealogy of that transmutation fully forgotten and repressed.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Moviéndome a través de la multitud, camino por el pasillo vacío, llegando finalmente a la misma habitación en la que estaba llorando cuando la hice molestarse la última vez. Entrando por la puerta abierta, la veo de pie con las manos en las caderas y su cabeza inclinada hacia mí. —Preferiría comer en un contenedor de basura que tomar dinero de ti —dice mordazmente. Debería callarme. Pero Dios me ayude, no puedo. —Odio decírtelo, pero ya lo haces —le digo—. Vives en una casa donde no pagas alquiler, ni servicios públicos, señorita. —¡Cocino y limpio para ti! —grita, pero dudo que alguien pueda escucharnos aquí atrás y por encima de la música—. ¡Pago a mi manera, imbécil arrogante! —Está bien, está bien —gruño, parpadeando larga y duramente—. Tienes razón, ¿de acuerdo? Pero, Jordan, los hombres se harán ideas. Pensarán que tienen un pase libre y pueden tocar lo que le pertenece a mi hijo. Lo estás avergonzando. —¿Tu hijo? —se burla, riendo—. Bueno, no lo viste, en realidad. Ya me vio y no le importa, Pike. Pensó que me veía bien y luego se fue con sus amigos. ¡No le importa! —¡Bueno, a mí me importa! Las palabras salen de mi boca antes que pueda detenerlas y me congelo, casi demasiado asustado para respirar. Oh, mierda. ¿Que acababa de decir? Su boca se abre un poco, pero se calla, probablemente conmocionada por mi arrebato. Sus ojos permanecen fijos en los míos, sin pestañear, con una mezcla de confusión y sorpresa escrita por todo su bonito rostro. Pero en lugar de arrepentirme, mi temperamento vuelve a aumentar rápidamente. ¿Cómo diablos puede no importarle? ¿Y por qué a mí sí? Jesús, mierda. Es una adulta, ¿cierto? Y si a su novio no le importa, entonces ¿quién soy yo o cualquier otra persona para dar su opinión sobre sus decisiones? No me corresponde. No, no hay nada de malo con lo que hace su hermana para mantenerse a sí misma o en cómo Jordan está vestida esta noche. Se ve jodidamente hermosa. Simplemente no... quiero que su cuerpo sea para todos. —Eres especial, Jordan. —Me acerco un paso más hacia ella—. Lo sabes, ¿cierto? Sus ojos comienzan a brillar, su mirada vacila y mira hacia otro lado. Dios, ¿sabe lo increíble que es? Me permito observar su piel suave y resplandeciente y la curva de su cintura frente a mí que es perfecta para aferrarse a ella. Un hombre debería verla vestida así y debería ser un hombre que aprecie lo que tiene. —No hagas cosas fuera de tu naturaleza por dinero —le digo—. Eres perfecta como eres. No cambies. No quiero que cambies. —Es solo un corsé, Pike. —Sí y luego será un concurso de camisetas mojadas y un trabajo en The Hook, ¿cierto? —contrarresto.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  If you died tomorrow, I would not give him a second look. And tell me this. Why do you hide the keys to your chest? It is as much mine as yours. Do you think you are going to make a fool out of me? You are not going to get my body and my goods. You must be mad even to consider it. You can have one or the other. But not both. Think about it, old man. What is the point of spying on me, and questioning the servants? If you had your way, I would be locked up in that damned chest as well. What you should be saying is this. ‘Oh dear wife, please go wherever you like. Feel free. I won’t listen to any rumours about you. I know you, Dame Alice, to be a true and faithful wife.’ That is what you should say. We wives never like husbands who pry or who try to control us. We must be at liberty. That’s the truth of it. ‘“The best of all you men was that wise astrologer, Ptolemy. He was from Egypt, wasn’t he? He wrote down a proverb in one of his books that sums it all up. ‘The wisest man,’ he said, ‘is the one who minds his own business and does not worry about the conduct of the world.’ You understand what he meant by that, I suppose? If you have enough, or more than enough, why should you bother about the pleasures of other people? Let me tell you this, you old goat. You will get cunt enough at night. Only a miser would stop a man lighting a candle with the flame from his lantern. Do you understand me? You will still be able to see in the dark. Don’t worry. No one has stolen your flame. ‘“I’m sick to death of hearing you say that we women should ‘dress demurely and discreetly’ just as if we were still virgins. You love to quote from the Bible, don’t you? What is that text? ‘No woman should be apparelled in precious stones or walk abroad with braided hair. No woman should dress herself in pearls or gold or fine fabrics.’ What a load of nonsense. I can’t even be bothered to argue with you about it. ‘“What is that? I am like a cat, am I? You only have to singe my skin, and I will never roam from home? Is that what you think? But if the skin of a cat is sleek and shiny, then she will not stay in the house for half an hour. She will be on the tiles before daybreak, showing herself off and setting up such a caterwaul that every cat in the neighbourhood will know she’s on heat. Do you get my drift? If I am in the mood, I will stray. ‘“What good is it spying on me, you old fool?

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Although Wittig herself is a “materialist,” the term has a specific meaning within her theoretical framework. She wants to overcome the split between materiality and representation that characterizes “straight” thinking. Materialism implies neither a reduction of ideas to matter nor the view of theory as a reflection of its economic base, strictly conceived. Wittig’s materialism takes social institutions and practices, in particular, the institution of heterosexuality, as the basis of critical analysis. In “The Straight Mind” and “On the Social Contract,”53 she understands the institution of heterosexuality as the founding basis of the male-dominated social orders. “Nature” and the domain of materiality are ideas, ideological constructs, produced by these social institutions to support the political interests of the heterosexual contract. In this sense, Wittig is a classic idealist for whom nature is understood as a mental representation. A language of compulsory meanings produces this representation of nature to further the political strategy of sexual domination and to rationalize the institution of compulsory heterosexuality. Unlike Beauvoir, Wittig sees nature not as a resistant materiality, a medium, surface, or an object; it is an “idea” generated and sustained for the purposes of social control. The very elasticity of the ostensible materiality of the body is shown in The Lesbian Body as language figures and refigures the parts of the body into radically new social configurations of form (and antiform). Like those mundane and scientific languages that circulate the idea of “nature” and so produce the naturalized conception of discretely sexed bodies, Wittig’s own language enacts an alternative disfiguring and refiguring of bodies. Her aim is to expose the idea of a natural body as a construction and to offer a deconstructive/reconstructive set of strategies for configuring bodies to contest the power of heterosexuality. The very shape and form of bodies, their unifying principle, their composite parts, are always figured by a language imbued with political interests. For Wittig, the political challenge is to seize language as the means of representation and production, to treat it as an instrument that invariably constructs the field of bodies and that ought to be used to deconstruct and reconstruct bodies outside the oppressive categories of sex.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I threw a couple of rocks back and told him to leave me alone. “Make me,” Ernie said. “I don’t make garbage,” I shouted. “I burn it.” This was usually a foolproof comeback, making up in scorn what it lacked in originality, but on this occasion it backfired. “Y’all Wallses don’t burn garbage!” Ernie yelled back. “Y’all throw it in a hole next to your house! You live in it!” I tried to think of a comeback to his comeback, but my mind seized up because what Ernie had said was true: We did live in garbage. Ernie stuck his face in mine. “Garbage! You live in garbage ’cause you are garbage!” I shoved him good and hard, then turned to the other kids, hoping for backup, but they were easing away and looking down, as if they were ashamed to have been caught playing with a girl who had a garbage pit next to her house. • • • That Saturday, Brian and I were reading on the sofa bed when one of the windowpanes shattered and a rock landed on the floor. We ran to the door. Ernie and three of his friends were pedaling their bikes up and down Little Hobart Street, whooping madly. “Garbage! Garbage! Y’all are a bunch of garbage!” Brian went out on the porch. One of the kids hurled another rock that hit Brian in the head. He staggered back, then ran down the steps, but Ernie and his friends pedaled away, shrieking. Brian came back up the stairs, blood trickling down his cheek and onto his T-shirt and a pump knot already swelling up above his eyebrow. Ernie’s gang returned a few minutes later, throwing stones and shouting that they had actually seen the pigsty where the Walls kids lived and that they were going to tell the whole school it was even worse than everyone said. This time both Brian and I chased after them. Even though they outnumbered us, they were enjoying the game of taunting us too much to make a stand. They rode down to the first switchback and got away. “They’ll be back,” Brian said. “What are we going to do?” I asked. Brian sat thinking, then told me he had a plan. He found some rope under the house and led me up to a clearing in the hillside above Little Hobart Street. A few weeks earlier, Brian and I had dragged an old mattress up there because we were thinking of camping out. Brian explained how we could make a catapult, like the medieval ones we’d read about, by piling rocks on the mattress and rigging it with ropes looped over tree branches. We quickly assembled the contraption and tested it once, jerking back on the ropes at the count of three. It worked—a minor avalanche of rocks rained onto the street below.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Brian nodded at the front door, and we all went outside and started making sand castles for scorpions. We figured that if we were all in the yard acting like the fighting was no big deal, maybe the neighbors would feel the same way. But as the screaming continued, neighbors started gathering on the street. Some were simply curious. Moms and dads got into arguments all the time in Battle Mountain, so it didn’t seem that big a deal, but this fight was raucous even by local standards, and some people thought they should step in and break it up. “Aw, let ’em work out their differences,” one of the men said. “No one’s got a right to interfere.” So they leaned back against car fenders and fence posts, or sat on pickup tailgates, as if they were at a rodeo. Suddenly, one of Mom’s oil paintings came flying through an upstairs window. Next came her easel. The crowd below scurried back to avoid getting hit. Then Mom’s feet appeared in the window, followed by the rest of her body. She was dangling from the second floor, her legs swinging wildly. Dad was holding her by the arms while she tried to hit him in the face. “Help!” Mom screamed. “He’s trying to kill me!” “Goddammit, Rose Mary, get back in here!” Dad said. “Don’t hurt her!” Lori yelled. Mom was swinging back and forth. Her yellow cotton dress had gotten bunched up around her waist, and the crowd could see her white underwear. They were sort of old and baggy, and I was afraid they might fall off altogether. Some of the grown-ups called out, worried that Mom might fall, but one group of kids thought Mom looked like a chimpanzee swinging from a tree, and they began making monkey noises and scratching their armpits and laughing. Brian’s face turned dark and his fists clenched up. I felt like punching them, too, but I pulled Brian back. Mom was thrashing around so hard that her shoes fell off. It looked like she might slip from Dad’s grasp or pull him out the window. Lori turned to Brian and me. “Come on.” We ran inside and up the stairs and held on to Dad’s legs so that Mom’s weight wouldn’t drag him through the window as well. Finally, he pulled Mom back inside. She collapsed onto the floor. “He tried to kill me,” Mom sobbed. “Your father wants to watch me die.” “I didn’t push her,” Dad protested. “I swear to God I didn’t. She jumped.” He was standing over Mom, holding out his hands, palms up, pleading his innocence. Lori stroked Mom’s hair and dried her tears. Brian leaned against the wall and shook his head. “Everything’s okay now,” I said over and over again.