Still, it went on to sell some 70,000 copies, enough to attract the attention of a major house that reissued the novel in 1975. Published by a small press after rejections by dozens of publishers, Rubyfruit Jungle was received not as a picaresque novel to shelve alongside Moll Flanders and Tristram Shandy but as a kind of softly “dirty” book in the Fear of Flying vein. So it is that Molly finds herself in faraway New York, where, through adventures and misadventures, she enters film school and battles the misogyny of faculty and students alike-and, with a few encounters that Freud would have called “polymorphously perverse,” finally emerges in a liberatory world where she might make a life on her own terms. By that time, in the early 1960s, Molly isn’t shy of calling herself a lesbian, though Mom has uglier words for her. Molly gets the first part right, but she’s not quiet enough, expelled from college when her relationship with a fellow coed is discovered. But if you’ll take a word of advice from your old man-do it all you want but be quiet about it.” When Molly is 16, her father dies, but not before telling her, “People are silly about sex.
She has a passionate relationship with a popular girl, cut short when her adoptive parents transplant her from Appalachia to Florida, then picks up the thread without dropping a stitch, courting a cheerleader. But most have to do with a dawning sexual awareness that leads Molly to realize, in a moment foreshadowed by foreskin, that her destiny lies with women and not men.īook-smart and gifted at gaming a system in which she’ll always be an outsider, Molly explores that sexuality through her teenage years.
Some have to do with lineage, some with things that happen to grown-ups in war and behind closed doors. Them that’s born out of wedlock are cursed as bastards.” So sputters the woman Molly Bolt calls Mom, revealing one of many secrets that the young girl will learn in the early pages of Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. “Them that’s born in wedlock are blessed by the Lord.
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