Lucky

Kira Obermeier

Intro to Women's Studies

December 15, 2005

Final Paper

But Was She Really Lucky?

"... but I had begun to notice that I was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn't understand it myself." And so begins the quest for reason and explanation in the case of Alice Sebold's rape. As she delves further and further into her story we can find many things discussed in the course of our semester in this class. Why was she raped? Why did her family and friends respond the way they did? We may not find answers to these questions, but if we look closer we may find some sort of help in determining an explanation - not only for Alice, but for ourselves.

In her memoir, Alice talks about her family before and after the rape. First I want to examine the social construction of her family as a whole. The family, as defined by John J. Macionis, is "a social institution found in all societies that unites people into cooperative groups to oversee the bearing and raising of children" (462). So, as it pertains to Alice's family, her parents were the "cooperative group" and Alice and her sister Mary were the children that are "born and raised" by the cooperative group. There are a couple different functions of the family, two of which include socialization and social placement. Socialization can be defined as "the lifelong social experience by which individuals develop their human potential and learn culture" (Macionis 115). Socialization is therefore imperative to a person's growth as a human being; without social experience, a child is incapable of thought, emotion, or meaningful action (Macionis, 115). So in the family setting, it is our parents that teach us this socialization. They teach us to think, feel, and act. In Alice's case, she and Mary were in fact socialized by their parents, but in a somewhat unorthodox way (although one could argue that being raised with one parent who is an alcoholic is not exactly "unorthodox," but for the purpose of this paper, the "typical family" I will be referring to is a family where both parents raised their children sober.) Alice referred to her childhood as being "raised in a house where my mother's problems provided the glue of family" (Sebold 162). Her mother was an alcoholic and both her parents tried to hide this fact from her. Alice's mother also suffered from panic attacks that she and her sister often referred to as "flaps." Her father spent most of his time locked away in his study. Because both her parents were somewhat "absent" during her childhood, Alice often times felt alone and nervous. This resulted in her somewhat distancing herself from society. Even when she moved away to college, she was often called "weird" by the other "normal" kids. As John J. Macionis states, "Ideally, parents help children become well-integrated, contributing members of society" (465). This was not the case with Alice's parents. She felt isolated from not only the institution of her family, but from society as well. This lack of socialization within her family contributed to the effect her rape had on the family as a whole. But does the fact that Alice wasn't socialized well enough at home mean that she was somehow prone to the idea of "emphasized femininity?" The answer is no.

The term "emphasized femininity" refers to the culturally established subordination of women to men. We can see a clear example of this when we examine Alice's mother. Encouraged by both her parents and her husband, Alice's mother stopped working once she was married. She was "supposed to" accommodate the interests and desires of her husband. Her husband, in turn, never showed her any kind of affection. This brought about and fostered her alcoholism. So because Alice was raised with such a weak mother figure, she herself fell subject to the idea of emphasized femininity. That's not to say that her mother was a weak person, simply that she, like so many other women during the fifties, was prone to fit the profile of subordination. Alice's relationship with her teacher Tess, however, helped Alice overcome this role of inferiority.

So was this the reason for Alice's rape? That she was simply used to this feeling