Reviving Ophelia
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The major thesis of Reviving Ophelia is that contemporary industrialized Western culture, chiefly by way of the mass media but also by way of family and peers, sends behavioral and attitude cues that young girls find difficult to ignore and that foster what amounts to the death of the self. In particular girls become dissatisfied with their changing body image and become anxious to please. The model is Ophelia, who is torn between pleasing her father Polonius and pleasing her would-be lover Hamlet. Unrewarded for doing either, she commits suicide. Today's adolescent girls are torn between family and culture, with culture's "junk values" implicated in "development of individual pathology" (26). How this works is Pipher's subject.The first chapter describes cultural pressures on young girls. Feminism may have given some women great jobs, but most working women have jobs at the margin, and the culture is hostile to feminism. Lip service to equality has been balanced by actual increases in pornography and violence toward women and discrimination against them. Women are devalued in general, and the culture has become more dangerous, less protected, for young girls. Meanwhile: "The gap between girls' true selves and cultural prescriptions for what is properly female creates enormous problems (22). Beginning with a case history of a girl whose charmed childhood gave way to a troubled adolescence and herpes, Chapter 2 develops the view that girls take on the attributes of a false
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mother-daughter conflict reaches a high pitch (104), and the stakes were raised in the 1990s with the emergence of such issues as AIDS, STDs, and relentless media messages. Particularly vexed are relationships between mothers and lesbian adolescents (111) because mothers may blame themselves for their daughters' unconventional sexual orientation.
Chapter 6 focuses on father-daughter relationships. Pipher cites the "double standard" of parenting where fathers are concerned. Many fathers are not emotionally "available" to children, and adolescence is a fragile time because fathers are witnessing changes from childhood to womanhood. But women are traditionally devalued by males. Essentially, Pipher invites fathers to examine misogynistic culture (116-17) and to apply its implications to their daughters' experience.
Chapter 7 looks at divorce, which despite its widespread and almost casual occurrence, is still emotionally hard on girls because it disrupts the "root system" of the family and deprives them of their emotional anchor. The worst casualty of divorce is the shattering of the father-daughter relationship.
Chapter 8 looks at how adolescent girls have responded to the tremendous cultural pressures, and many of them turn aga
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Approximate Word count = 1275
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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