The World According to Garp 595ing the reader the unusual insight of exploring
the somewhat causal, always tenuous relationships
between a writer’s life and his writing. Irving leads
his readers steadily through Garp’s eccentric life:
chasing down side-street speeders, cooking in the
afternoon, fretting fruitlessly about his children,
running anxiously and continuously through streets
littered with the detritus of suburban angst and
frustration. In the most explored relationship in
the novel, Garp and Helen’s marriage suffers from
complications of their own making, from the dif-
ficult yearnings of unrealized expectations to infi-
delity and, ultimately, mortality. When in doubt,
Irving’s characters do something, and inevitably—
occasionally tragically—it is the wrong thing. The
World According to Garp is a comedy in the bleakest
sense. Its humor and warmth are punctuated by the
human suffering of its title character and his imme-
diate family, but the book never loses its strange
brand of optimism.
Aaron Drucker
Gender in The World According to Garp
In Garp’s world, women are victims and men lust.
In The World According to Garp sexual identity is a
prescribed role even as gender is constantly trans-
gressed. Much of the novel serves to differentiate
between gender and sexual identity. Sexuality, in all
its forms, is generated from Jenny Fields’s peculiar
perspective. Garp’s mother is an unlikely feminist,
but in the novel, she is the preeminent figure of
feminism, the woman who is emblematic of the
contemporary, second-wave feminism. She begins
her book, A Sexual Suspect, with the pronounce-
ment: “In this dirty minded world . . . you are either
somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore—or fast on
your way to becoming one or the other.” Gender
is a state of being, a power position, either owner
or owned. Women are told they are owned; men
do the telling. It is not an equal relationship, and it
has nothing to do with sexual identification, per se.
Her appearance is embodied by the nurse’s uniform
she unceasingly wears. In that symbol of antiseptic
femininity, the social and professional embodiment
of the caretaker for the sick and injured, she fulfills
the gender role of female without, in fact, identifying
herself with the feminine. She is essentially asexual
(the act of procreation, for her, was an affair engaged
in with a phallus and little else—certainly not a
father, in more than the biological sense), and thus
she denies and transcends the owner/owned (male/
female) binary she actively protests. She engages
almost exclusively in homosocial relationships, and
though she is not lesbian, she has no interest in men,
whom she largely views as victimizers, abusers, or
fools. Jenny Fields sets the stage for the curious and
often contradictory portraits of gender in The World
According to Garp.
Garp is the product of Jenny Fields’s stern and
clinical indifference to social sexuality. In her pro-
nouncement, “Men lust,” Garp is no exception. In
some ways, his maleness is less complex than Jenny
Fields’ femininity. Throughout the novel, he carries
out several sexual escapades, both licit and illicit.
From his first détente with Cushie Percy to his
unsympathetic lust for Mrs. Ralph, Garp engages
the sexuality of his gender with Jenny Fields’s prac-
tical simplicity. He identifies himself with the male
who cannot (or will not) curtail his sexual desire.
His maleness is defined by his sexual needs and
conquests. Such an identity is not without limits,
however. Encountering the radical, bastardized ver-
sion of lust—a rapist of prepubescent girls—Garp
actively pursues the criminal, catching him (forc-
ibly), and turns him in to the authorities. There is
a point, for any man, at which more lust becomes
too much lust and desire becomes violation, even in
Garp’s more open interpretation of sexual propriety.
While his inability to keep his zipper shut causes
any number of complexities in his life, it is only in
regard to sex itself that Garp holds on to gender
circumscriptions. In his home life with Helen and
the kids, he explicitly disregards traditional gender
roles, staying at home to write and care for his
children and household while Helen carries on a
professional position. He is a loving father and care-
taker, even to the point of being ostentatious. While
he expresses an awareness of the social reversal—he
is embarrassed, for example, when he explains that
he is a “writer” and no, you haven’t read anything
he’s written—he is also happy in this role: the active
and encouraging parent who protects and pushes
his children into their promising future. Though
Garp represents a “stay-at-home-Dad” as well as