Plain Pleasures (Masterplots II: Women’s Literature Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Jane Auer
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Work: Short stories
- Genres: Short fiction, Character study
- Subjects: Sex or sexuality, Suicide, Gender roles, 1940’s, Prostitution or prostitutes, Alienation, Manners or customs, 1930’s, Emotions, Rape, Sisters, Women, Imagination, Conformity, East and West
Form and Content
Jane Bowles’s stories often focus on women who are loners. Some are steel-willed and independent; those who are not await whatever force will spring them from marriage, domesticity, or the boredom of middle-class life. Bowles’s characters are quirky, even disturbing, in ways she devised to challenge stereotypical notions of what women are or should be in the twentieth century. Some of her women are conservative (to the extent that they ape socially acceptable ideologies of their class); others are radical in their behavior and distinctly amoral.
...[The entire page is 2461 words long]
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