Read Online In Rough Country by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page A

the curled lips, the prognathous jaw, the powder, the mascara, the scarlet lipstick and, most shattering of all, the massive shored-up bosom that projected like a balcony in front of her…And there she stood, the pneumatic giant, swathed from neck to ankles in the stars and stripes of the American flag.
    It must be that such misogynist female portraits are self-portraits of the misogynist’s malformed soul, they draw forth such quivering, barely containable loathing. 3
    As Jonathan Swift is the most obsessively scatological of English satirists, so Roald Dahl is the most obsessively sexual,in stories as casually lewd as “The Great Switcheroo” (two men, wholly ordinary husbands and fathers, plot to “switch” wives in the night, without the silly wives’ knowing) or as doggedly protracted as “Bitch” (the womanizer Oswald Cornelius finances the development of a perfume with irresistible aphrodisiac powers, brand-name “Bitch”) in which the very man who is revolted by massive Mrs. Ponsonby ends up having sex with her in what, one assumes, Dahl means to be a comic scene:
    I was standing naked in a rosy room and there was a funny feeling in my groin. I looked down and saw that my beloved sexual organ was three feet long and thick to match. It was still growing. It was lengthening and swelling at a tremendous rate…Bigger and bigger grew my astonishing organ, and it went on growing, by God, until it had enveloped my entire body and absorbed it within itself. I was now a gigantic perpendicular penis, seven feet tall and handsome as they come.
    In the breezy “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat” the unnamed narrator, presumably speaking for the author, with the impassioned lunacy of Philip Wylie ranting about women—“Momism”—in the long-forgotten screed against women Generation of Vipers (1942), informs us:
    America is the land of opportunity for women. Already they own about eighty-five percent of the wealth of the nation. Soon they will have it all. Divorce has become a lucrative process…Young men marry like mice, almost before theyreach the age of puberty, and a large proportion of them have at least two ex-wives on the payroll by the time they are thirty-six years old. To support these ladies in the manner to which they are accustomed, the men must work like slaves, which is of course precisely what they are.
    Yet, from time to time, a clever man can exact a merciless punishment upon a woman, even when, as in “The Last Act,” the woman has been a devoted wife to her late husband, after years of mourning at last daring to revive an old boyfriend’s interest in her, with cataclysmic results:
    Then at last, Conrad put his tongue into one of her ears. The effect upon [Anna] was electric. It was as though a live two-hundred-volt plug had been pushed into an empty socket, and all the lights came on and the bones began to melt and the hot molten sap went running down into her limbs and she exploded into a frenzy…She flung her arms around Conrad’s neck and started kissing him back with far more gusto than he had ever kissed her and although he looked at first as though he thought she was going to swallow him alive, he soon recovered his balance.
    In this crude misogynist fable which Jeremy Treglown in his introduction concedes that Dahl “would have done better to have scrapped,” the vengeful Conrad so humiliates Anna sexually, the poor woman is driven to commit suicide.
    In the yet cruder misogynist fantasy “Georgy Porgy,” apriggish, sexually repressed minister is both repelled by and attracted to women:
    Provided they remained at a safe distance, I could watch them for hours on end with the same peculiar fascination you yourself might experience in watching a creature you couldn’t bear to touch—an octopus, for example, or a long poisonous snake.
    Recoiling from his childhood experience with a