Gender Power and Female Sexuality in Susan Minot's "Lust"

Introduction: Romance, Gender, and Minot's 'Lust'

Many authors have tried to capture, in print, the complex dynamics between men and women. This can be a very difficult process, as it can be nearly impossible to put into words exactly what happens when two people enter into a relationship. Fictional stories have explored all the various stages of romance and love that can affect two people — some discuss marriage, others divorce, and some the beginning of a romance. In Susan Minot's short story "Lust," a young female protagonist lists her past liaisons with young men and recounts what she did with each of them. The story is set in the 1960s or 1970s, a period in American history when women were breaking free from more than two hundred years of oppression by male-dominated society. During this period, women as a gender were slowly moving away from societal gender stereotypes and exploring their own sexualities. The narrator of Minot's story serves as a representative of the women of her time.

Historical Oppression of Women in the United States

Women in the United States have been considered marginalized, second-class citizens since before the time of the Founding Fathers. While the nation was still a colony of Great Britain, the social order of what would become America was firmly established. Men — only white men at that time — were in control. Only they could vote. In most cases, only they could own property. When a woman married, anything she had acquired in her lifetime, whether through her own endeavors or through inheritance, would come under the jurisdiction of her far more powerful husband.

Following that era came fluctuations between periods of limited freedoms and more stringent oppressions, with gender as the sole basis for women's marginalization. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, in the aftermath of the Second World War, women were pushed into roles of complete submission. This was the era of the homemaker, wherein women were trained to be wives and mothers and could aspire to little more in their lives.

The Post–World War II Cult of Domesticity and Silence

Coinciding with this domestication of women was a cult of silence and oppression. There were things that were acceptable to discuss and things which were absolutely not — whether in public or even within the home. Among the forbidden topics were a woman's dissatisfaction with her place in the world and any feelings of sexuality she might have had. During this time, sex was understood as either a means of procreation or a wifely duty to satisfy the husband. Women were not supposed to engage in sexual activity for their own satisfaction. If they did, they became the kind of woman that polite society also refused to acknowledge. It would be a logical psychological consequence that such a repressive era would eventually give way to a completely free and sexually experimental period in its wake.

The Narrator as a Product of Patriarchal Society

The narrator of Minot's story appears to be a relatively young girl at the beginning of the story. From her language and vocabulary, one can estimate that she is in her mid-to-late teens. She experiments with a large number of males — far more than a "good girl" would ever imagine interacting with. What is particularly interesting is that in each instance, the narrator engages with men in scenarios where the male is the aggressor and she is the dominated one. An example appears in one of her encounters with a man named Tim: "Tim pinned me to a tree" (Minot 4). In every instance, the girl is the sexualized object while the man is the one who demands physical action from her.

Another example occurs when she says of one lover, "He goes, 'Shush'" (Minot 5). The word is used to silence her when she objects to something the lover wants. This is not the act of a male lover trying to calm a frightened young woman; it is the gesture of a paternal figure silencing a belligerent child. The term is not only controlling — it is patronizing.

The narrator also comments subtly on the patriarchy of her society. She observes that parents are never aware of the truth of their children's conduct (Minot 5). The parents in her life are not merely ignorant but seemingly indifferent as well. What they do know of their daughter's relationships is filtered through antiquated ideas about how young men and women should interact. A mother of this era would have been a product of that post–World War II cult of domesticity. Just as it would never have occurred to her to engage in sexualized activities in her own youth, it would never occur to her that her daughter might behave any differently.

Women in the United States of the late 1950s and 1960s were not only battling the domestic indoctrination of their mothers but also contending with the patriarchal basis of the entire society. A character like Minot's narrator would feel the compulsion to satisfy her own innate sexual desires, yet polite society would never permit her to explore them openly. She would be expected to enter the domestic world her mothers inhabited and become the unambitious wife of one of the nation's ideal male figures. The narrator's mother expects her daughter to marry and then become a mother — the daughter's goals, in this ideal world, should mirror the mother's own.

Works Cited

Minot, Susan. "Lust." Lust and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin / S. Lawrence, 1989. Print.