Gender

Rubyfruit Jungle explores the impact of gender conditioning. From the very beginning of Molly's childhood, she is under constant pressure to be feminine. Her mother expects Molly to become skilled in cooking, cleaning, and other domestic skills in order to marry, while her adoptive father wants her to go to college. Even her best friend, Leroy Denman, can't understand what Molly wants to be when she gets older.

In an early scene, Molly, Leroy, and another friend named Cheryl decide to play nurses. When Molly announces that she will be a doctor Cheryl disagrees, saying: "You can't be a doctor. Only boys can be doctors. Leroy's got to be the doctor." Molly disagrees and insists that she will be the doctor because she is "the smart one." Cheryl counters with, "It doesn't matter about brains, brains don't count. What counts is whether you are a boy or a girl." Molly promptly punches her in the mouth.

As this vignette makes clear, Molly must fight against the gender expectations from women as well as men.

In the aftermath of Molly's fight with Cheryl, Molly's mother announces that "she's gonna make a lady" out of her, teaching her to "act right, cook, clean, and sew." For her, femininity is constructed from a series of tasks and chores that must be repeated daily. Being female becomes a ritual Ð'-- a set of proscribed actions that must be invoked day after day. Crucially, these rituals take place in the home. Molly argues that she "can learn them things at night," and should be allowed to explore all day.

Attempting to conciliate, Leroy announces that he, too, will stay in. Molly's mother immediately assaults his masculinity, "telling him what would happen to him if he picked up women's ways soon they'd take him to the hospital and cut his thing off." For all of these characters,