Maggie Nelson’s “Jane {a murder}” is a creative novel that presents the reader with a collage of different texts from multiple sources in regards to her aunt’s traumatic death. Nelson’s approach to representing the events that occurred is female dominated and frame the only male family member, Jane’s father, as having a low level of interest in making Jane’s murder a public and dragged on case. There is an overrepresentation of females being intuitive and having a grander connection to their emotions in comparison to men in American culture. The gender norms within a predominantly heterosexual society is that men are supposed to maintain a tough exterior no matter how emotional or depressed they are feeling. Men are supposed to be emotionally
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This excerpt is about how after Jane’s murder, the police tapped her family’s house phone in order to screen the frequent calls of condolences for the family’s loss. Most often the call were from college kids and young high school boys, but Nelson chooses the include that the most frequent call “was a woman,a disembodied female voice fake-crying in a falsetto”(Nelson 111). This line emphasizes that women are most involved and emotional when it comes to grieving, even if they do not have a personal attachment to the deceased person. Maggie Nelson also asserts her view of her grandfather in this passage when she writes, “I imagine my grandfather in the middle of the night in his flannel pajamas, his eyes shrunken and bleary without his glasses. He sits on the edge of the bed, speaking quietly into the tapped phone. Stop calling, he says. Please leave us alone” (Nelson 111-112). Because Maggie Nelson decided to include this part in her excerpt it presents to the reader how the father has once again distanced himself from the murder and would prefer for his grieving to not be as public. Even how she says that he decided to say it quietly, as opposed to the gender construct that men are belligerent and loud, makes a big difference. She chooses not to portray him as angry to justify that men have a way of concealing their
This excerpt is about how after Jane’s murder, the police tapped her family’s house phone in order to screen the frequent calls of condolences for the family’s loss. Most often the call were from college kids and young high school boys, but Nelson chooses the include that the most frequent call “was a woman,a disembodied female voice fake-crying in a falsetto”(Nelson 111). This line emphasizes that women are most involved and emotional when it comes to grieving, even if they do not have a personal attachment to the deceased person. Maggie Nelson also asserts her view of her grandfather in this passage when she writes, “I imagine my grandfather in the middle of the night in his flannel pajamas, his eyes shrunken and bleary without his glasses. He sits on the edge of the bed, speaking quietly into the tapped phone. Stop calling, he says. Please leave us alone” (Nelson 111-112). Because Maggie Nelson decided to include this part in her excerpt it presents to the reader how the father has once again distanced himself from the murder and would prefer for his grieving to not be as public. Even how she says that he decided to say it quietly, as opposed to the gender construct that men are belligerent and loud, makes a big difference. She chooses not to portray him as angry to justify that men have a way of concealing their