The World According To Garp

Once again, the motif of lust causes considerable anxiety about the structure of gender roles. While Garp demonstrates somewhat progressive ideals instilled in him by his mother, he also categorizes women into the wife/“whore” binary that Jenny loathes. Garp views Helen as a sweet intellectual whose ability to critique his writing establishes her as a good partner. At the same time that he is writing her love letters and asking her to marry him, he is sexually promiscuous and acting as if he is completely unattached. When Jenny challenges Garp’s behavior, he acts as if lustful wanderings are something that all young men should be entitled to, viewing it as a necessary portal of growth and self-discovery even though it jeopardizes his relationship with Helen. Garp’s wandering eye foreshadows what he believes is his inability to remain loyal to Helen during their marriage; even as a teenager, he justifies infidelity as a male privilege and views some women as made for sex and some women as made for marriage. He does not believe that women can be made for or enjoy both, and he does not believe that women can fall into a third category. When he contracts gonorrhea after sleeping with a random person without protection, Garp fears the threat to his masculinity since it means he is sexually out of commission for a bit.

Encountering the raped child challenges Garp’s worldview since she is obviously too young to fit his understanding of women’s roles. Garp’s confidence in the entitlement of male lust loses some credence as he realizes that uncontained lust can have consequences, especially when channeled through violence. Horrified to think that he and the Mustache Kid have much in common, Garp is forced to think differently about his lustful lens toward all women but does not use this as an opportunity to stop viewing every woman as either someone he will sleep with or someone he won’t sleep with. Rather, he views the incident as confirmation of other men’s weaknesses.

Garp demonstrates some semblance of progressiveness when he is content with Helen remaining the breadwinner while he stays home to care for their child. However, his constant cheating on her suggests that while he says he is content with the division of labor within their marriage, he still feels a need to validate his masculinity by sleeping with as many women as possible. In an attempt to be a part of this validation, Helen pursues a sexual liaison with Harrison while Garp sleeps with Alice, but knowing the identity of Garp’s sexual partner does not make her feel any better about the situation. Aware that she and Garp have a nontraditional marriage, Helen attempts to experiment with other nontraditional ways of satisfying her husband. Ironically, she still bears the stereotypically female weight of emotional labor as she seeks to improve her marriage and find ways of reconciling their differences; Garp is happy to thoughtlessly destroy, while Helen takes it upon herself to fix.

The embedded narrative of “The Pension Grillparzer” shows Garp’s juvenile writing style and demonstrates his tendency to draw inspiration from real people and places around him. Garp’s first attempt at a second novel draws heavily from his own life, and Helen is furious that he would dare depict their marital strife in such intimate detail. Helen’s dislike at Garp’s novel depicting her also contributes to the themes of Anxiety and the Under Toad and The Intimacy of the Written Word; Helen starts to worry that living with and being married to a novelist means that her actions are always under scrutiny, forever examined as something to potentially incorporate into a novel. Garp becomes more self-conscious, assuming that he will incorporate elements of his own life into a novel and hoping that his life is interesting enough to justify this. The intimacy of language and literature exposes the cracks in the Garps’ marriage; writing exposes truths in ways that neither Helen nor Garp can avoid. They have both devoted their lives to literature, and literature threatens to destroy them.

The intimacy of the written word takes on new meaning in this section as several instances of parallelism demonstrate the intimacy of the relationship between reader and writer. The correspondence between Garp and Helen will determine if Helen thinks Garp is a good enough writer to marry. Jenny believes that her text is so riveting that she sits down after giving it to John Wolf with instructions that he read it immediately, as if his reading experience needs to be amplified by her physical presence. Just as Garp lives and dies by written praise, so too does he live and die by written criticism. His streak of pettiness toward critics is first established with his sassy reply to the magazine that rejected his Grillparzer story. Once he realizes that he can use this streak of pettiness to defend his loved ones, he indulges his opponents by crafting lengthy responses. Garp believes that he can change the minds of people who have time on their hands to write hate mail, and he only grows more cynical as he realizes that he cannot change their minds.