http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200809/patty-hearst/
"Girl, Interrupted"
by Caitlin Flanagan
September 2008
The Atlantic
The first page of this article is the most interesting - it discusses how the Hearst kidnapping symbolized a conflict that was taking place all across America at the time: parents trying to hold onto "model" daughters, who were pulled away by a different lifestyle (the underlying theme: sex). What is interesting in the way it portrays the family's abandonment of these formerly perfect children, once they had fallen. My thoughts: this indicates that the parents were in love, not with their child, but with a particular image of their child; they could not accept them as who they are. (I don't mean to say anything more than precisely that). There are probably more detailed-oriented and interesting things to be said on the subject, but I don't have the relevant expertise / knowledge.
The rest of the article discusses Hearst in more detail, and is less interesting, except for the following bit of analysis (and a good number of hilarious lines):
"And then she even found a way to stop the rapes, at least some of them. She did it not by resisting the sex, but by falling in love with one of the men who was performing it. In its way, that was a powerful thing to do—to transform the nature of an act by changing the way you think about it. "
Interesting stuff, that is.
2 comments:
I think the author has chosen the wrong symbol for this conflict. Hearst was kidnapped and raped and beaten into her "conversion". The author's sister got on a plane and went to Europe. The voluntary appeal of the "bohemian" lifestyle, vs the forced submission of a young sheltered girl. Sorry, Ii don't see the connection. Bad analogy.
Indeed, there are differences to the cases. What I think the author means to point out is that _despite_ being beaten and raped into her conversion, the public reacted rather badly to it - it lost a lot of sympathy for her. It's another instance of people being more concerned with an image of a person than the person themselves - once Patty Hearst was no longer seen as that Model Daughter, but instead as a fallen woman, they turned their backs on her.
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