SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

Although this passage reveals the gang’s preoccupation with gender differences, it also
challenges such dichotomies. In the italicized portion, Maddy reveals that the gang strives for a
structure based on their own ideas and concepts, one not modeled on common and dominant
male paradigms. Such a new model could reflect Oates’s sympathy with socialist feminism;
however, because of the all-female structure of the gang, it might also imply sympathy for
separatism. Additionally, Maddy calls Foxfire a “true sisterhood,” thereby implying the existence
of false sisterhoods. This part of the passage—“a true sisterhood not a mere mirror of the
boys”—indicates that this falsity could be structural; their conscious choice to mirror existing
male paradigms, rather than to create their own structure and value system, is marked as less
valid. This urge for structural originality in their new community, when coupled with the
characters’ valuation of sisterhood, suggests a separatist gender ideology; in other words, they
move from a liberal or socialist feminism to a more radical sort. At this point in the narrative,
when such a sisterhood remains an abstract concept, Oates seems sympathetic to the possibility.
As the novel progresses, however, and the gang members become more and more militant, the
practicality of their particular separatism becomes suspect. Their increasing militancy, violence,
and aggression echo traditionally male methodology; Oates, therefore, represents as less
sympathetic a separatism that fails to be very different from the oppressive dominant structure.
To show this progression, Oates juxtaposes her characters’ increasingly separatist gender
politics with her representation of Hammond’s patriarchal social structure—its maleness, its
compulsory heterosexuality, its economic superiority. One character who represents the
privileges and abuses of patriarchal power with which the gang must contend is Legs’s father,
Ab. Because Legs is running away from her grandmother’s house and, possibly, the police, the
authority to which Legs refuses to surrender is both familial and societal. This general rejection
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