How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Since Rachel Baffin is one of the main actors, in a crucial sense perhaps the main actor, in my drama I should like now to pause briefly to describe her. I had known her for over twenty years, almost as long as I had known Arnold, yet at the time that I speak of I did not really, as I later realized, know her well. There was a sort of vagueness. Some women, in fact in my experience many women, have a sort of 'abstract' quality about them. Is this a real sex difference? (1.3.38)
Hmm. Or maybe, Brad, it has something to do with your own perception of women, or with the teensy-weensy slivers of real attention that you bother to pay to their ideas, feelings, and concerns? Just a thought.
Quote #2
Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines. […] Rachel was an intelligent woman married to a famous man: and instinctively such a woman behaves as a function of her husband, she reflects, as it were, all the light onto him. Her 'blankness' repelled even curiosity. One does not expect such a woman to have ambition: whereas Arnold and I were both, in quite different ways, tormented, perhaps even defined, by ambition. (1.3.38)
Something tells us that Bradley Pearson wouldn't think highly of women like Yoko Ono, Jackie Onassis, Margaret Trudeau, Marie Curie, Michelle Obama, Virginia Woolf…need we go on?
Quote #3
The sound of that abandoned weeping was scarcely bearable, and something far too intense to be called embarrassment, yet of that quality, made me both reluctant and anxious to look at her. A woman's crying can sicken one with fright and guilt, and this was terrible crying. (1.3.43)
In The Black Prince, Bradley Pearson demonstrates that the crying of both men and women is deeply disturbing to him. How is a woman's crying different from a man's crying, in his view, and why does it produce different responses?