How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Title.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Pa just gathered Pleasant's traces and walked him back to the barn, asking the mule if he had any idea why Frank Loomis had four good sons and he didn't have one. (5.misnomer.57)
After Royal helps Mattie plow a field, he and Pa talk about farming. And the fact that Mattie overhears her father disparaging his children because of their gender (and what they can and can't do regarding physical labor and social customs) doesn't really give her confidence in gender equality.
Quote #5
And then one moved higher and before I knew what was happening, he was kneading my breast, pushing and pulling on it like he might a cow's teat.
"Stop it, Royal," I said, breaking away, my face flaming.
"What's wrong?" he asked. "You saving them?"
I couldn't look at him.
"For who, Matt?"
And then he laughed and started back home. (13.xerophilous.37-42)
Mattie likens the way Royal touches her to how he touches a cow—instead of flowery language and intimate caresses, Royal treats her like a farm animal, a commodity. And then he has the audacity to ask Mattie why she wants him to stop and laugh at her, as though it's funny she has an opinion on this interaction. If we didn't dislike Royal and his treatment of women, we sure do now. Clearly, he doesn't value Mattie for more than her body.
Quote #6
I'd heard all about A Distant Music. I'd read articles about it in Aunt Josie's cast-off newspapers. They said that Emily Baxter was "an affront to common decency," "a blight on American womanhood," and "an insult to all proper feminine sensibilities." It had been banned by the Catholic Church and publicly burned in Boston.
I thought there would be curse words in it for sure, or dirty pictures or something just god-awfully terrible, but there weren't—only poems. One was about a young woman who gets an apartment in a city by herself and eats her first supper in it all alone. But it wasn't sad, not one bit. Another was about a mother with six children, who finds out she's got a seventh coming and gets so low spirited, she hangs herself. One was about Penelope, the wife of Ulysses, setting fire to her loom and heading off to do some traveling herself. And one was about God being a woman instead of a man. (23.dehiscence.7-8)
Emily Baxter's poems are powerful stuff, especially because they are poems in which women have opinions and independence and emotions about their sexual identities and ambitions, even a spirituality and sacredness to them. And while these ideas tantalize Mattie, society (not just the rural community but the larger national community as well) feels threatened by these concepts. Ugh.