SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

The passages above also show that Ab attempts to “get rid of” Legs, to divest himself of
his responsibility as a father, by sending Legs to live with her grandmother. Ab, in other words,
represents the dominant community’s privilege of simply maintaining its own centeredness, of
insulating itself in its own authority while leaving marginalized groups adrift and on their own.
In one sense, Oates may have constructed the character of Ab Sadovsky—who is largely an
absent presence in the text, mainly appearing in flashback or in Maddy’s narrative reconstruction
of Legs’s verbalized history—to represent this male prerogative of not exercising authority.
Legs’s decision to avoid her father upon returning to Hammond represents a conscious decision
to separate from the potential use of his authority. In choosing Maddy’s house over her father’s,
Legs regains her agency. The choice is no longer in Ab’s hands. The patriarchal characters—Ab,
Wimpy, Buttinger, the male gangs—represent two equally oppressive variations on male power
structures, the privileges of using or choosing not to use power; but Legs’s agency indicates that
women have choices as well.
Wimpy, Buttinger, and the male gangs, on the other hand, represent a more aggressive
version of male authority. They all use the power of the objectifying male gaze and/or physical
violence to mark the girls of the neighborhood as less powerful and to mark themselves as
dominant heterosexual men. Wimpy, the typical Lowertown businessman, represents dominant
capitalism; Buttinger and the male gang members represent other, varying levels of male
socioeconomic existence, respect, and power. Yet in all these cases, Oates hints that, while
stopping the male gaze and patriarchal oppression altogether may be impossible, the formation of
a cohesive, recognizable sisterhood may redirect that gaze and deflect that abuse. Because
Wimpy “wouldn’t waste time looking” at the Foxfire gang as a whole, the girls have even more
proof that their secret society has the power to alter, in ways both overt and subtle, existing
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