Chapter 3 - Leviticus

Personal Reflections

Things start to pick up a bit more in this chapter, although the pacing is a bit confusing to me. I confess I found the fairy tale digressions (which become more prominent in this chapter; I barely mentioned them in the previous two because they were such small parts of the story up to that point) to be more engaging and interesting than the main story. The style of writing for Jeanette's story is so detached and loose in it's treatment of time that it's difficult to know what to focus on or where dramatic weight should be placed, which makes it a bit difficult to get invested. Small and innocuous details are interspersed with revealing, and often frankly horrifying revelations about the awful things that are said or done to the main character even though she is still a child. It's unclear how old she is at this point in the story though; the passage of time is unclear, so I can't really tell if she's still meant to be 7 or 8 years old (just starting elementary school) or if she's grown older now, and might even be approaching middle school. But there were still parts that I found interesting, and make me feel intrigued about what will happen next.

For example, there's an interesting scene in this chapter where the narrator's mother is upset because she can hear the neighbors "fornicating," (although the narrator doesn't know the meaning of the word, just that it's a sin) and tries to cover her daughter's ears so she can't hear it. Jeanette, of course, doesn't want to have the world hidden from her and resists being deafened, and has to be placated by being sent out on errand to pick up ice cream for the family. When she gets back, the noise has stopped but her mother and their guest Mrs. White are still concerned that it may start back up again, so they start loudly playing piano and singing hymns at them as retribution for their loud and sinful behavior. When the neighbors come out into the backyard and yell at them to shut up, Jeanette's mother yells back at them by quoting scripture about how they're all going to hell. The whole scene is so absurd and wild that it's hard to know what exactly to focus on, but I think what most jumps out at me is the fact that the the narrator's mother insists on bringing her into "godliness" by making her participate in activities meant to respond to and punish the sinfulness of "the Heathen" ("a daily household preoccupation," as she describes them) once again while not explaining what it is they have done wrong and preventing her from understanding the world outside of their own religious perspective. In order to maintain its own boundaries, the cult needs to isolate its members from the rest of the world, including keeping children ignorant about what's happening outside of their small community. It's also unclear in this scene how old Jeanette is, which brings in other questions related to the theme of sexuality and how it is discussed in this community.

Critical Response

For my analysis of this chapter, I'd like to focus on the fairy tale interlude that occupies its second half. This comes immediately following this passage: 

"The sermon was on perfection, and it was at this moment that I began to develop my first theological disagreement.

Perfection, the man said, was a thing to aspire to... It  could only be truly realised in the next world, but we had a sense of it, a maddening, impossible sense, which was both a blessing and a curse.

'Perfection,' he announced, 'is flawlessness.'

From there, the theme of perfection is explored through an allegorical digression wherein a prince tries to find a woman to be his wife who is, per the sermon, both perfect and flawless. When he finds a woman who is perfect, he insists on marrying her because he believes he has found the flawless woman he has been seeking. But she rejects him, saying that she is simply not "very interested in" getting married, and refutes his theory by stating that as perfect as she may be (with "a perfect balance of qualities and strengths. She was symmetrical in every respect"), she still has flaws. He is unable to publicly accept that he was wrong because it would call his authority as ruler into question, and so ultimately he condemns her perspective as heretical and has her killed rather than risk losing his power by admitting his own flaws.

There is a lot to unpack in this story thematically and in terms of Jeanette's character (and therefore her relationship to the church and to other people in her life), but for the purposes of this analysis I would like to focus on point of view instead. What does it say about the narrator and the way the novel as a whole is being told that the story increasingly is being filled with digressions to allegories, fairy tales, and other fantastical stories that are totally separate from Jeanette's life up to this point? I believe what it is saying is the way that the imagination, and the use of stories and imagined perfected ideals (in this case perfection and flawlessness) has become one of the primary ways the narrator makes sense of the world because of her religous and cultural upbringing. Even though it has departed from Bible stories themselves, and the plot is of an original creation, not based on preexisting fables or fairy tales, it still fits within an aesthetic and thematic perspective that supports the spiritual priorities of a strongly isolationaist religious community. And I think that tells us a lot about why the author chose to tell her own story in the form of a meandering novel like this, as well as a lot about the narrator as a character and how she fits into that story as a whole. Especially considering the fact that this doctrine of perfection as flawlessness, which she has expressed her first disagreement, represent a struggle to live up to an impossible ideal that dominates both her and her mother's lives up to this point in the novel.