Applesauce (novel)

Applesauce (1966) by June Arnold is an experimental feminist novel. It follows Liza, a young woman raised in the southern United States who fragments her sense of self into several personalities to deal with the pressures of contradictory gender roles. "Eloise" represents a sex kitten, "Rebecca" is an intellectual in graduate school, "Lila" is an Earth mother, and "Gus" is a male alter ego Liza invents so she can discover her sense of self separate from womanhood and conventional femininity. Quotes For years she was too little to run out by herself because something might happen to her, until she was too big because the other thing might happen. p. 29 [Gus] sat still but barely listened, because he was watching Jo's face and body for landmarks, tiny forgotten expressions and expressionless gestures which would connect the stranger sitting here now (surprisingly aged) with the other people he had known over the past quarter-century who went by that name and face. p. 89 Beginning at birth, [Gus] thought, the project [is] myself. How build a man not allowed to be a man. p. 91 That's the whole point. If I were ugly, I would have accepted it by now; or if I were beautiful. It's just this middle ground, this being slightly homely, plain, uninteresting-looking — just this missing being pretty — that causes all the trouble. Because then you see, I hope and I try — I take tweezers and pull out hundreds of hairs to change my hairline because I've decided, ah, there's the trouble; you'd be pretty, Rebecca, if you just didn't have such a low forehead, and it works. For a day or so (hour or so) I'm pretty. Then I think, no, it isn't the forehead, it's your mouth. It's too thin...But that's the trouble. One has to be just near enough to being pretty to long to be, and to believe a man when he says 'You're beautiful,' but far enough to know, always, underneath, that it's a lie. pp. 110-111 Every day she gave [her children] Dinah and Alice and Juni (separately according to their individual needs) — love. Every day she reached, smoothed, opened, added a grain of strength to their store. And at the end of every day she felt the coming on of panic: she was dispensing grains from a stockpile that didn't exist; she was giving love from the red side of the book, she was robbing emptiness by closing her eyes and pretending there were grains, hoping that somehow they would become grains, that the air held in her closed fist would in passage granulize itself into a single tiny grain just once more. It had so far. But every night, in payment for getting her wish, she had to feel the full force of her own emptiness plus the minus emptiness from all her back borrowings. This of course increased (at the rate of two grains daily). p. 190 External links τ he:ויקיציטוט:תבניות דף/יצירות