Identity Crisis

Before I start writing, here’s the link where I found the summary of Freud’s Dora case.  The similarities between Dora and Mary are uncanny, down to the way Dora “chokes” and coughs at the mention of Herr K while Mary does the same when Dr. Hammer brings up K. What strikes me as odd, though, is that the same incidents that happened to Dora concerning an adult male family friend happened to Mary even before she read Dora’s case.  Herr K drunkenly kissed Dora while their two families were vacationing together on a lake when Dora was sixteen.  Mary’s family friend Kurt Thatcher kissed her while the families were together at the Cape.  Both men invited the young girls to their empty offices years earlier and made advances toward them.  “Years later,” Mary reflects, “when she had read Dora, the book ignited a chain of electric connections [...] she became emboldened not only by her own injustice but by a continuum of injustices linking her to Bettina and Dora and Dorcas Hobbs and Abigail Lake and beyond” (127).  In the same paragraph that she acknowledges her “injustice,” she admits that Kurt’s kissing her was as a “confirmation that she was, or had the power to be, bewitching.”  This leads me to believe that the kissing itself, and the advances and come-ons to girls in general, is not the injustice.  I think it’s the negative connotations attached to young female sexuality: “The kiss did not ruin her; her mother’s slap did.”  And Freud and Dr. Hammer are apparently enabling this history of reprimanding, since they associate the girls’ stories with hysteria and hyperradiance.

Although Mary admits that she’d been playing “games” and it’s assumed that she had at least partially made up the story of the abduction (maybe she planned the abduction without the man, her “victim,” knowing it), I don’t feel as hostile toward her as I had while starting the novel.  I found myself feeling pretty bad that her relationships were so fragile if they were even still whole.  When Regina drove Mary home from visiting Roz, all I wanted was for her sister to have a conversation with Mary without judging her.  Mary tries to talk to Regina about her recent ex-fiance and Regina sarcastically attacks her by asking if she wants to talk about “Tomahawk-waving rapist witch spirits” (231).  God, even my older sister isn’t that bad. Gaby seems detached from Mary, and everyone else for that matter, never missing a chance to throw around brutal insults.  And Aunt Helen’s just a drunken transluscent old mess.  Could the family’s strained relationship with each other really be all Mary’s fault?  It seems like none of the relationships are clear cut or stable or based on much of a foundation.  At least the ones involving Mary.  But I find it hard to pin the fault on her.  Roz and Dr. Hammer, to sum it up, aren’t exactly the most centered psychologists.  I think it was Hoppin that mentioned that Roz only cared about Roz, and Hammer ends up getting all wrapped up in his theory of hypperradiance and refutes any evidence Mary offers that doesn’t support that theory.  Neither therapist is client-centered. They phrase questions and make assumptions, pretty much telling Mary what’s wrong with her as if she’s not the expert on herself. (Social work language coming through.) 

I feel so tempted to read to the end since I’m so close, but as much as the suspense is killing me, it’s kind of fun to imagine how Julavits will end the novel.  She’s got a lot of ends to tie up, that is, if she even wants to resolve everything.

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