What the fuck was her problem?? Jesus Christ just take the loan and go to Europe if you're that butthurt about it.
I kept seeing this book on /lit/ and my local bookstore. Make me don’t want to touch it.
>>25549168East of Eden has a woman that is the literal personification of evil
it's a good bookif he decided to beat her ass into submission, she would have stopped being a bitch, wifebeating was also more condoned back then
>>25549168This book is a massive plothole because irl he would have shipped her off to the asylum
>>25549179she was a psychopath through and throughwhat meaning would you give to how she imagines escaping with Alice in Wonderland as she's dying
>>25549182>if he decided to beat her ass into submission, she would have stopped being a bitch, wifebeating was also more condoned back then>>25549184>This book is a massive plothole because irl he would have shipped her off to the asylumI think this drives home how weak and non-confrontational Stoner really was. He could have lived a much better life but he was always too passive. He didn't fight for his child, against his wife, for his love affair; the most confrontational he ever gets is the business with Walker and even there he ends up being a pushover, and subsequently becomes Lomax's punching bag for the rest of his academic career.
>>25549168Stoner was a pussy faggot and could have put that bitch in her place many times and chose not to. The whole book is about the dangers of being low-agency. Yeah, she sucked, but she would have been a lot more content in the relationship if he was a Chad.>>25549179This is real answer, despite the fact that EoE is painfully unsubtle in its use of allegory. Cathy is one-dimensional
what about amazing Amy
>>25549178it's a melancholy little book, just a patient vivisection of a small, miserable life stoically and passively endured.
>>25549219The thread between Stoner, East of Eden, and Gone Girl is weak husbands that were unable to Chad their wives around. The lesson here is that men are the only people that can hurt you non-consensually, while women can only hurt you if you let them.
>>25549226>Stoner trying to convince himself he isn't a failure right before he diesBroootal...
>>25549229I thought the "What did you expect?" part was him accepting that his life was a failure and that it was determined to be that way from the beginning.
>>25549168Her parents were were a kind of New Englander who worshiped a caricature of class and purity that was totally inchoate and unlivable. They were prudish and strict because they were fundamentally uncomfortable being humans, and couldn't explain it, so they wound up producing an adult-baby who expected a chaste idyllic life with no details. This turned into hatred and disgust whenever she found out anything about anyone, and she spent all day ruminating on how she'd been cheated out of her perfect marriage and domestic life those idiots had promised her.
>>25549250Yes. The parents were also unhappy, discontent people and they could not teach Edith what they did not have. She naively clung to the hope that leaving home would give her some sort of fulfillment, as thought following some predetermined template of marriage and children would fix her. But it couldn't, and she passed the same discontentment to her own child.
>>25549168It's pretty good. Stoner becomes likeable once he's older. Still, he is too passive, much like his parents were, much like how it was for Edith. Given these two ways of living -- Stoner buried in his books and professional life, Edith regretting becoming a mother and minding only social appearances, it's no wonder Grace turned out the way she did.
>>25549250this explanation makes more sense than the redditor who concluded she was an abuse victim
>>25549961Every other review on goodreads is about how Stoner "raped" her.
>>25549961>What I picked up on>It's just her plainly stated characterization>it would have made reading the book more bearable>now I feel much more sympathetic for herI don't understand why she needs to have been literally raped for her story to be tragic or worthy of sympathy
>>25549168Wasn't the whole point that he didn't bother trying to understand her
>>25550445Well when you get right down to it the central theme of the book is that people can get locked into a groove that makes it impossible for them to understand or make themselves understood to one another. Stoner has this pithy line in the middle about how for medievals "grammar" was a comprehensive world-framing thing, and it's kind of the keystone for the book. For Lomax its his us-vs-them cripple solidarity thing. For his wife it's her childish immaculate fantasy of what being married is. For his parents, it's the farm. They're limited in what they can understand on their own, and Stoner's fatalism is its own "grammar" both comforting in its structure and tragic in its limitations. It's not that he's just nonconfrontational, because he does insist at a couple points in his life, and a lot he could solve by careful explanation. It's just the mismatched grammar between him and others makes it impossible to communicate. In a way it's amazing he found it in him to convince his family to let him change majors.
>>25549209>the only time Stoner stood up to anyone was vs a crippleKind of funny
>>25549228Women are certainly able to shoot you or stab you to death in your sleep or throw acid on you
>>25549254>she passed the same discontentment to her own child>>25549275why did the daughter become a whore when the mother didnt?what was the secret sauce?
>>25549996Current consensus is that you don’t force yourself onto someone who is visibly not happy about it, even if they don’t talk about it directly. There was this moment where he would “make love to her” as quick as possible because he has actually noticed how she wasn’t into it. Like, I know, historical context is such that this is what it was like back in time, but people probably want to highlight that the past wasn’t the happiest either.
>>25552659edith kept pressuring grace to be popular and grace figured out that sleeping around made her popular
>>25552170By marrying an insane bitch that you can't Chad around or refusing to Chad a normal bitch around you are inviting that violence into your life
>>25549178It's good faggot
>>25549996That's silly you can't rape your own wife!
>>25552895Do you not ever feel embarrassed using a male first name to describe... whatever you think that means? To capitalize it even?
