Down Girl by Manne Kate;

Author:Manne, Kate;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The woman is not only interacting with her waiter, in an interpersonal exchange, but evincing myriad other powers of mind and autonomous agency: she has preferences, orders accordingly, reads her magazine, plans (it being a radio schedule), writes, calculates, and walks with an “extraordinary speed,” such as to outpace Meursault. The two of them are playing essentially the same part in the same social script, in tandem. But on a woman, the behavior seems odd, even funny. She subsequently seems out of place—her place—and somehow unconvincing, fake, even veritably robotic, in this role. Much the same (including the “robotic” charge) was said of Hillary Clinton when she was running for president in 2016 (see chapter 8). And here, too, Clinton was playing a role historically exclusively reserved for men—and asking for that which she might have been expected to give to him. To wit: support and attention, which many people who might otherwise have been expected to give to her (in being strongly opposed to Trump, among other things) withheld in her case.

The next time Meursault encounters the “little robot woman” is in court. By that time, he has shot and killed “the Arab” who stared daggers in his direction, and who made him feel inhuman, like a mere object or impediment. Like a rock or a tree, specifically; a movable object with no will of its own. Meursault is out and about with his friend Raymond, when they first encounter “the Arabs,” whose gaze is described as having a withering, petrifying, even dehumanizing effect on our narrator—in his mind, that is—simply by looking in his direction in a way he finds inscrutable. To wit:

They stared at us silently, in the special way these people have—as if we were blocks of stone or dead trees. Raymond whispered that the second Arab from the left was “his man,” and I thought he looked rather worried. However, he assured me that all that was ancient history . . . There was no point in hanging about here. Halfway to the bus stop he glanced back over his shoulder and said the Arabs weren’t following. I, too, looked back. They were exactly as before, gazing in the same vague way at the spot where we had been. (32)

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