The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in The Deer Park: Difference between revisions

Although Eitel is a man “with considerable masculinity of mind,” his masculine mindset seems to be powerless in front of Elena. He begins to change with his love affair with Elena. To him, Elena has something that other women always lack, just as he believes, “not too many women really knew how to make love, and very few indeed loved to make love”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=89}}, but “Elena was doubly and indubitably a find.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} He learns something about Elena from the way she makes love, for he “always felt that the way a woman made love was as good a guide to understanding her character as any other way.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} Believing that “to be a good lover, one should be incapable of falling in love”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}}, Eitel “usually wanted nothing more than to quit a woman once they were done.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=91}} However, when it comes to Elena, he no longer believes what he used to believe because “he not only wished to sleep the night with Elena but to hold her in his arms.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=91}} Elena makes Eitel realize that “he had never been with anyone who understood him so well”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} and therefore he believes that Elena is “the best woman” he has ever had.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=97}} Consequently, he believes that his affair with Elena “could return his energy, flesh his courage, and make him the man he had once believed himself to be.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} He also believes that he and Elena each “could make something of the other.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} After the affair, “he felt full of tenderness for Elena” and “through the day he toyed with the thought that she should come to live with him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} But unlike what Eitel expects, Elena does not want to live with him because she does not want to lose her freedom and selfhood she has just achieved, as she tells him, “You can do what you want, and I’ll do what I want.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=98}} When Eitel becomes furious with her for her affair with Marion Faye, Elena refuses to surrender to his criticism; instead, she is very defiant, saying that “I’ll go if you want me to go” and that “I think we’d better quit now, you and me.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=101}} Feeling that Eitel has treated her as “a game,” Elena says defiantly to him, “When a woman’s unfaithful, she’s more attractive to a man.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=101}} Elena does not believe that Eitel loves her, but when she finds that he really does love her, she says with final abandon, “Nobody ever treated me the way you do. I love you more than I ever loved anyone.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=102}} However, when living with Eitel, Elena seems to have lost her selfhood completely once again, as the narrator states, “in the first few weeks of living together, Elena’s eyes never left Eitel’s face; her mood was the clue to his temper; if she was gay it meant he was happy; if Eitel was moody, it left her morose. No one else existed for her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} That, however, does not mean that she is quite sure of Eitel’s feeling towards her. On the contrary, she is always doubtful. Once she says to Eitel, “You think I’m not good enough for you. . . You tell me I don’t love you because you don’t love me. It’s all right. I’ll leave.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=108}} After Eitel confirms his love for her, she becomes calm and says, “Oh, Charley, when you make love to me, everything is all right again. Is it really the same with you?”.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=147}} Another time, she says to him calmly, “I could be happy with somebody else . . . I’m going to leave you some day, Charley, I mean it.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=152}} Still another time, she even says to Eitel, much like an order, “Love me, really love me, and maybe I can do what you want.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=160}} Eitel comes to feel somewhat fed up with Elena and appears to be pleased when she tells him that Marion wants her to live with him because he knows if someone else cares for her, “his own responsibility was less.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}} Although he believes that Elena is “the most honest woman I’ve ever known”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}}, Eitel finds that “the time had come to decide how he would break up with her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=178}}

===Notes===