Mary O'Connell (2) (1944–)

This study gives a qualified blessing to Updike, who has had many feminist critics, as one of "the precursors of the contemporary movement among men to reexamine their cultural inheritance as males" (p. 237). The argument is explicitly Jungian.

O'Connell exaggerates some of her points, accusing the author of "killing" female characters in his books. One has the impression that the harshest passages are left over from an earlier, more inculpatory reading by O'Connell's of the Rabbit books (a mere trilogy at the time this book was published). However, she is successful in demonstrating convincingly that in Rabbit's world "all of the males in the society, regardless of their relative positioning on the hierarchical ladder of privilege and regardless of their politics, are blindly unified in their domination of woman" (p. 159).… (mehr)