This Boy's Life

In the memoir This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff touches on a number of issues vital in American society today. They were just as important but much less well-known in the mid-1950s when the story is set and when young Toby and his mother move around the country to escape an abusive relationship. Violence against women is not new, of course, but it was often tolerated in the past, while today it is given much greater priority as a society-wide problem. The story is also a spiritual journey for the young boy, who develops a sense of self in his travels and prepares for adulthood and for a more liberated existence than his mother was ever able to achieve. The book was published in 1989 and was widely read and liked, and in 1993, the story was filmed, much less successfully. For one thing, the film version is superficial where the book was not and offers a more simplistic vision of the problem, the nature of the boy's life, and the idea of his ultimate realization of the value of his own life.

Toby and his mother live in the East and head for the West so she can escape an abusive boyfriend and find a new life. They settle in Seattle, and there the mother becomes involved with another man, a garage mechanic, while Toby continually gets into trouble by hanging out with the wrong crowd. The mother marries the mechanic, but soon after the discover that he is another abusive alcoholic, suggesting that she keeps making the same mistake over and over again, however unwittingly. The

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ied to blacks, Jews, Orientals or, for that matter, women. In this genre, the good guys are women and children. The bad guys are adult white menalmost inevitably brutal, stupid, violent, seething with rage against women (Morrow 52). Of course, Morrow's point of view is undercut by the fact that this story comes from a memoir and not a novel as well as from the fact that there are so many abusive men ill-treating both their wives and their children, a fact much discussed in the literature today even if ignored and winked-at in the past. Morrow sees this as false on its face, though, as if years of stereotyping women is now being met with years of stereotyping men: The assumption is that men are fair game. Any man insulting is retributive: a payback for the years, the centuries, of male domination and oppression. And for the continuing Awfulness of Men (Morrow 52). In truth, of course, Wolff does not say any man is fair game and only criticizes those he knew and who abused his mother. The film is more superficial in its presentation of these issues and does make the abusive boyfriend into more of a stereotype, but this is more a case of poor filmmaking than a reasoned attempt to live up to some new political idea of the a

Category: Literature - T