An Essay For English
I wrote an essay on Pat Conroy's Lords of Discipline. I was told it was good, and I think it's pretty good. Thus I submit it to you, dear eljay, for your edification and constructive criticism.
Freud theorized that males without intimate, nurturing mothers would develop what he called a Madonna-whore complex (alternately, a virgin-whore complex), in which a man would court women who resembled his mother in order to make up for the intimacy he felt he somehow missed during childhood. The woman he married would become a kind of maternal or Madonna figure to him, and thus not an object of possible sexual attraction. Conversely, he would see sex as something reserved for “bad” women, and his feelings of love and sexual attraction would become mutually exclusive. We see this same polarized categorization of women in the world Pat Conroy lays out for us in Lords of Discipline.
On one hand, we have Theresa, Pig’s girlfriend. The very first time we hear about her, Pig is getting angry at Gooch for making a lewd remark about his girlfriend. Pig tells him, “If you only knew how good she was, how humble, how quiet, how smart […] You’d beg me to kill you. That’s how ashamed you’d be.” (p.40) We can see he reveres her as-literally-a Madonna figure when he tells the cadet to apologize for swearing in front of her picture. As he explains to his roommates, it’s exactly “like church. When I look at a statue of the Virgin, I fill up with love. I kiss the feet of the statue like it was the mother of God herself.” (p. 40) He attributes those same divine qualities to Theresa. He literally worships her. When Will describes his own mother, he calls her “as lovely a woman as I have ever seen, bred and nurtured like a gardenia, she has always seemed somehow odorless and sexless to me.” (p. 4) Again, we see a woman put on a pedestal. If she is worthy of being loved, she is perfect and untouchable.
In stark contrast with this is Will and Tradd’s reaction to the strippers. Tradd even says at one point, “’I have never seen such sickness, Will. What can possibly be attractive about those two sorrowful women?’ ‘Pretend to be filled with lust,’ I said to Tradd. ‘We're part of the act.’” (p. 244) Will recalls that he enjoyed the show, until the mother says the girl’s name. “By giving her a name, she had implicated me, made me responsible, guilty.” (p. 244) In other words, she had become more than an object of attraction. She had become a person, someone who could be loved, and therefore someone who could not be lusted after blindly.
Interestingly, the one woman who transcends these archetypes is the woman who we come to dislike the most. Annie Kate represents a kind of perfect union of sex and love for Will. He can be in love with her and yet also attracted to her. It’s also interesting to note that Annie Kate’s relationship with Will is totally secret. Will and Annie Kate do not have a “typical” boyfriend-girlfriend relationship in which they can go out on dates, hang out with their friends, and otherwise be open about their relationship. At the end of those nine months, Annie Kate tells Will that she wants to erase “every bad memory from my mind. You’ve been very sweet, Will, but you’ve been a large part of the worst year of my life.” (p. 349)
Will’s rejection at the hands of Annie Kate could be seen as symbolic of this innate failure of Conroy’s women. Conroy populates his stories with women who are “good” or “bad” in extremes, but Annie Kate is a rare mixture of the two. She symbolizes a perfect but impossible balance between the two opposing forces of virgin and whore, a union as wonderful and fragile as the sand dollars Will receives in the mail, shattered to pieces in transit, with no note and no return address.
Freud theorized that males without intimate, nurturing mothers would develop what he called a Madonna-whore complex (alternately, a virgin-whore complex), in which a man would court women who resembled his mother in order to make up for the intimacy he felt he somehow missed during childhood. The woman he married would become a kind of maternal or Madonna figure to him, and thus not an object of possible sexual attraction. Conversely, he would see sex as something reserved for “bad” women, and his feelings of love and sexual attraction would become mutually exclusive. We see this same polarized categorization of women in the world Pat Conroy lays out for us in Lords of Discipline.
On one hand, we have Theresa, Pig’s girlfriend. The very first time we hear about her, Pig is getting angry at Gooch for making a lewd remark about his girlfriend. Pig tells him, “If you only knew how good she was, how humble, how quiet, how smart […] You’d beg me to kill you. That’s how ashamed you’d be.” (p.40) We can see he reveres her as-literally-a Madonna figure when he tells the cadet to apologize for swearing in front of her picture. As he explains to his roommates, it’s exactly “like church. When I look at a statue of the Virgin, I fill up with love. I kiss the feet of the statue like it was the mother of God herself.” (p. 40) He attributes those same divine qualities to Theresa. He literally worships her. When Will describes his own mother, he calls her “as lovely a woman as I have ever seen, bred and nurtured like a gardenia, she has always seemed somehow odorless and sexless to me.” (p. 4) Again, we see a woman put on a pedestal. If she is worthy of being loved, she is perfect and untouchable.
In stark contrast with this is Will and Tradd’s reaction to the strippers. Tradd even says at one point, “’I have never seen such sickness, Will. What can possibly be attractive about those two sorrowful women?’ ‘Pretend to be filled with lust,’ I said to Tradd. ‘We're part of the act.’” (p. 244) Will recalls that he enjoyed the show, until the mother says the girl’s name. “By giving her a name, she had implicated me, made me responsible, guilty.” (p. 244) In other words, she had become more than an object of attraction. She had become a person, someone who could be loved, and therefore someone who could not be lusted after blindly.
Interestingly, the one woman who transcends these archetypes is the woman who we come to dislike the most. Annie Kate represents a kind of perfect union of sex and love for Will. He can be in love with her and yet also attracted to her. It’s also interesting to note that Annie Kate’s relationship with Will is totally secret. Will and Annie Kate do not have a “typical” boyfriend-girlfriend relationship in which they can go out on dates, hang out with their friends, and otherwise be open about their relationship. At the end of those nine months, Annie Kate tells Will that she wants to erase “every bad memory from my mind. You’ve been very sweet, Will, but you’ve been a large part of the worst year of my life.” (p. 349)
Will’s rejection at the hands of Annie Kate could be seen as symbolic of this innate failure of Conroy’s women. Conroy populates his stories with women who are “good” or “bad” in extremes, but Annie Kate is a rare mixture of the two. She symbolizes a perfect but impossible balance between the two opposing forces of virgin and whore, a union as wonderful and fragile as the sand dollars Will receives in the mail, shattered to pieces in transit, with no note and no return address.