Gerald R. Lucas

From my Flickr buddy Bearded Jon. He’s an Alaskan and the biggest Palin supporter I know. Just kidding, Jon. One of my other Flickr buddies Jim sent me a recent Newsweek article, also about Palin and the GOP’s surprising support of her. Quindlen writes that the “conservatives have probably used the word ‘sexist’ more in [...]

Sir John Everett Millais’ 1852 painting “Ophelia” might be subtitled “Western Literature’s Woman.” It seems to me that the history of Western Literature has prescribed this role for its women: the drowned suicide of men’s struggles for power and control. Ophelia is the metaphor for a real world of patriarchal desire for control. Ophelia is [...]

Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken” is about what it means to be a woman, and the battles they must fight to write today. It is an essay about revisionary mythmaking and the process Rich had to undergo to define her own idiom as a woman writer. She begins her theme by showing how [...]