The Writer As Explorer

This week’s reading, “The Girlie Show” by Megan Abbott, brings us the character Pauline. Pauline is a middle-aged woman who is in a  bad marriage with man who both abuses her and cheats. The beginning of the story shows us that Pauline is a woman who works hard to provide for herself and her husband while he pursues his career in art. We see that their marriage is very strained, to say the least, and toxic. With Pauline feeling the need to walk on eggshells when she is with her husband. When he asks her to pose nude for him as she has done in the past, I felt as though maybe their relationship could maybe mend itself with them spending this time together, but I was mistaken. I think the one thing we do see is Pauline finding herself again and being reminded of her own beauty. An example of her awakening is the first night of her modeling, she described a moment in which she saw her own nude reflection and smiled to herself. Later on in the story, we find Pauline with the stripper Mae, one of the women her husband has been pursuing. Instead of being mad at Mae or any of the other women, Pauline took the moment to reinvent herself from a humble woman who is not even seen by her husband to a star who is seen and admired by many men.

This is part of the reason I love this story so much. Here we have a protagonist who is forty-two years old living in the 1940’s, a decade in which women were oppressed and were to be seen, not heard. This makes it extremely hard to be able to express their needs or wants or to tell others when their safety is threatened. Pauline went through extreme abuse and mistreatment from her husband, but through meeting the woman who should’ve been a threat to her, she found herself opening up to the world and to herself. Through this impulsive and brave act, I believe, Pauline freed herself from her own unhappiness, and in the end her husband also received his karma — a serious beating — which hopefully will give her a chance to finally leave him.