Chapter 4 - Numbers

Personal Reflections

This is the chapter where the theme of (homo)sexuality starts to become unavoidable, culminating in Jeanette's budding friendship (or perhaps something more than just friendship?) with Melanie. As noted before, the passage of time in this novel is not exactly clear, but it seems by this point that Jeanette has entered her teens (or at least attained the age of 12 or so). Certainly she has become more focused on topics pressing to adolescence, including her concerns about how so many women seem to have married "beasts" disguised as men. She is concerned about the disconnect between what she was told growing up and what she is observing now that she is becoming more aware of the adult world. One particular incident ties into one of her first recognitions (after the discovery that she was adopted and being denied the opportunity to meet her birth mother) of the ways in which her mother has lied to her. One of her mother's favorite books, which she read to Jeanette as a child, was Jane Eyre, which her mother also held up as a testament to the romantic love between Jane and St. John Rivers. But of course, "I now knew that she had rewritten the ending... I found out, that dreadful day in the back corner of the library, that Jane doesn't marry St John at all, that she goes back to Mr. Rochester." She compares the betrayal she feels upon making this discovery to how she felt after learning that she was adopted and that her mother sent her birth mother away on the one occasion when she came to visit. I also found this literary reference to be really interesting on a personal level because of how much Jane Eyre is regarded as an important and relatable novel for a lot of women readers (although written at a time when few women were publishing novels, much less having them taken seriously by the reading public) but its reputation as a "romance" is more ambiguous. Some people find Rochester to be a flawed but ultimately charming male lead playing alongside Jane, while others are skeeved out by the fact that he claims to love her and wants to marry her even though he lied about keeping his ex-wife (the proverbial madwoman in the attic) locked up in his house. It's nice to see that ambiguity and contradictory aspects of the romantic aspects of that novel being discussed in this one.

Critical Response

The reoccurring dream at the start of the chapter starts to add more substance to the theme of sexual awakening in this novel. In her dream, she is getting married but the groom is revealed to be something wrong or off: "Sometimes he was blind, sometimes a pig, sometimes my mother, sometimes the man from the post office, and once, just a suit of clothes with nothing inside." But the significance of the dream is dismissed by her mother, who claims it just happened because she ate sardines for dinner. We see in this sequence that Jeanette is starting to recognize, even if she doesn't know how to articulate it yet, that she isn't interested in being intimate, dating, or getting married to a man. This information is obscured from her, though, because she is in a social environment that does not consider homosexuality to be a real or valid way to be and sends her mixed messages about sexuality and gender relations. In this scene the narrator also tells us that:

        There was a woman in our street who told us all she had married a pig. I asked her why she did it, and she said, 'You never know until it's too late.

        Exactly.

        No doubt that woman had discovered in life what I had discovered in my dreams. She had unwittingly married a pig.

So even within the established conventions of compulsory heterosexuality, there are contradictions and double standards that she has to navigate. In addition to the ways that this informs Jeanette's character, on a thematic level this functions in the text as a commentary on the ways in which heterosexuality is assumed as the default for women even though it is somewhat common for hetero-identified women to complain about how much they don't like men, and it is difficult to separate those personal grievances and disinterest from the collective ways in which women are often exploited by men.