After practicing law for ten years in New York City, Marilyn Adler Papayanis returned to school to get a PhD in English literature. She is the author of Writing in the Margins: The Ethics of Expatriation from Lawrence to Ondaatje (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005) and has published articles in LIT and Society and Space. Her article "Feeling Free and Female Sexuality: The Aesthetics of Joni Mitchell" appeared in the December 2010 issue of Popular Music and Society. She teaches English literature and composition at Berkeley College in New Jersey. Drama · Memoir · Religion & Spirituality · Women in Film
Both protagonists undertake a kind of “work of the self,” whereby they simultaneously come to terms with trauma – in one case, paternal betrayal, in the other, maternal abandonment by[…]
“Popular culture feels compelled to interrogate the ‘barren’ years, in some cases expressed as a contradiction between competing life goals: the other-oriented value of maternal self-sacrifice and the inner-oriented value of following one’s bliss. The aging mother should, in theory, be free to indulge her desires. When desire runs afoul of ‘age appropriate’ codes of conduct, however, the positive goal of self-actualization can take a nasty detour.”
“I didn’t come all the way down to Jamaica to become a slut.”— How Stella Got Her Groove Back
“How can it be that the act that socially and historically has defined masculinity and to which, to a significant extent, male self-esteem is ultimately linked is not reliably rewarding to women?” —Rachel P. Maines
