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

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park''}}

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{{dc|dc=B|efore its publication in 1955,}} ''The Deer Park'' had been refused by seven publishers in ten weeks for no reason than its “six not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=330}} After its publication, it received more criticism than praise, and “the most common objection to the book was its sexual explicitness”{{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=6}} because “in the early 1950s no description of sexuality, however evasive, was readily accepted.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=145}} In spite of responses from publishers and critics, Mailer refused to make any change of the original lines about “the sex of an old producer and a call girl” and the novel came out as it is now, with the sexuality of his characters to play “the more significant role” in the story.{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=143}} The issue of sexuality in ''The Deer Park'' has drawn much attention from critics. Nigel Leigh argues that “in ''The Deer Park'' sexuality is both foregrounded and incorporated into Mailer’s political epistemology”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=77}} and “Mailer investigates closely the sex lives of Sergius, Eitel, Elena, Faye and Lulu Meyers in a search of a discourse of pleasure.”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Robert Merrill holds that the novel is “only incidentally a satire on Hollywood or an outlet for Mailer’s philosophical predilections; at heart it is the story of a rather tragic love affair.”{{sfn|Merrill|1978|p=45}} Norman Podhoretz points out that “it is on the sexual affairs of his characters that Mr. Mailer concentrates in ''The Deer Park''.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}}