The Shipping News (E. Annie Proulx)

The action of The Shipping News does not focus mainly on Agnis but rather on her nephew Quoyle, a lumbering hulk of a widower whose faithless wife Petal had done a lot of emotional damage to him and their two daughters before selling the daughters to a pornography photographer and then being killed in an automobile accident with her lover. When Quoyle accepts Agnis's invitation to leave upstate New York to resettle (with his rescued children) in her childhood home, a big old "saltbox" house on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland, the relocation is an emotional exercise--more exactly exorcism, given the events leading up to the move--for him as much as it is a physical fresh start: Some time before Petal's death Quoyle's terminally ill parents had committed suicide, explaining their reasons by leaving a dispassionate message on Quoyle's answering machine. Agnis sets up housekeeping and transfers her ya

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on's controversial advocacy of censorship of pornography. Her view is that the traditional terms of argument in matters sexual need to be exposed as having a male bias, by way of inserting (if one may so phrase it) the reality of women's experience in the culture in the social equation so as to question structures of discourse predicated of a male standard. The content of men's sexuality is presumed as a baseline for pornography experience, whereas women's sexuality "as such is a stigma. . . . We [women] are not allowed to have it; we are not allowed to talk about it . . . from our own point of view. . . . [W]e have to be either asexual or virgins." Whether this line of argument is logically sound is not relevant to the present research; its relevance is that it sharply exposes the presumption of men's participation, free agency, and functionality in whatever shape the mainstream culture might take. The idea of asking whether men should be allowed to act in such-and-such manner does not typically arise because the male is the standard of participation, and differences from the standard are perforce measures of women against that standard. The feminist social critique questions why and whether that measure should persist and concl
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Agnis Quoyle, Isles Quoyle, Agnis Hamm, Shechner Writers, Nightmare Isles, Killick-Claw Agnis, Mavis Bangs, Ironically Guy, Shipping Agnis's, Annie Proulx, social critique, feminist social, feminist social critique, male standard, feminist discourse, agnis quoyle, feminist critique, social norms, agnis's memory, narratives edited robert, readings narratives, jr nancy levit, agnis's experience, robert hayman jr, hayman jr nancy,
Approximate Word count = 3666
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)