SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

Mrs. Sadovsky is literally absent from her daughter’s life and seems mysterious to Maddy
because Legs will not speak of her. In discussing the crucifix Legs uses in the gang’s sacral
initiation ceremony—a passage that I will examine later in this chapter—Maddy says that it
was the inexpensive object forgotten in the Sadovsky household like certain
plaques and grubby little monuments in Lowertown at which no one ever
consciously looked any longer, now merely decorative, or not even decorative but
simply . . . there? nailed up on the hallway hall between Ab Sadovsky’s bedroom
and Legs’ bedroom by the woman who’d been Legs’ mother who had died of
whatever illness or accident Legs refused to say nor would she so much as speak
of her lost mother even to confirm grudgingly yes she’d had a mother, once.
Shit. That’s ancient history. (Oates 37)
Legs’s mother, then, is not a person (either to the characters or to the readers of Oates’s novel)
but a shadow seen only through the objects she has left behind. Maddy’s comparison of her to
objects “simply . . . there” suggests Mrs. Sadovsky’s lack of material substance in the novel and
her failure as a model for the girls. Because the fact of her existence is so easily not seen,
because Legs calls her mother “ancient history” and refuses to speak of her, we can intuit that
Legs has rejected both her mother and the idea of using death as an escape from Hammond. In
this way, Oates represents the value of women’s voices and some possible problems inherent in a
limited sisterhood.
If Mrs. Sadovsky lacks immediacy in the text because of her absence in both the narrative
and in Legs’s formation of subjectivity, Maddy’s mother manages to remain emotionally absent
in spite of her occasional physical presence. When she does appear, she symbolizes the kind of
woman that Maddy and the gang hope not to become. The crucial scene illustrating Mrs. Wirtz’s
failure as feminist model is the text of Part One, Chapter Two, entitled “Black Eye.” This scene
takes place, chronologically, after the Foxfire members tattoo themselves in their sacral rite of
sisterhood. Maddy’s use of her body as text contrasts with how men use her mother’s body to
symbolize their power over her; this contrast relates to the literal and figurative silences that
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