`` Perfect Peace `` Gender, Sexuality, And Love - 947 Words

Perfect Peace is an incredibly crafted novel which describes the transformation of the novel’s protagonist from femininity to masculinity. As the child learns to surrender his identity as Perfect and assume his persona as Paul, the Peace family and the entire Swamp Creek community struggle with complicated questions about gender, sexuality, and love. While reading the novel, It may seem that there is an opposition that the community conveys towards Paul is due to his assumed sexuality but If read closely this opposition is due to not sexuality is but it is due to the established gender roles within the Swamp Creek community. Black establishes the importance of gender roles within the book’s opening pages as Gus awaits the annual spring rains that will allow him to purge through tears once a year without fear of criticism. As a child, Gus’ father physically disciplined him for crying in order exemplify how a man was supposed to act. As an adult, Gus forward these teachings to his children just as everyone within the community did to usher a normality to these lessons. This importance was define once again when Gus’ eldest hid the yearly purge from his brothers originally because he could not understand as the novel explains it, â€Å"men could be as emotional as women, and that one of those men was his own father,â€Å" (Black 38). Throughout the novel, notions of gender roles are persistently instructed into the younger characters’ cultural system repeatedly. This issue first arisesShow MoreRelatedLoneliness By Stephen Gordon And Angela Crossby878 Words   |  4 Pagesher hands were completely empty. She who would gladly have given her life, must go empty – handed to love, like a beggar. She could only debase what she longed to exalt, defile what she longed to keep pure and untarnished† (Hall 2978). 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