Rubyfruit Jungle
Rita Mae Brown
1973

Introduction

When a small feminist press published Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle in 1973, the novel sold 70,000 copies despite being almost completely ignored by reviewers at major magazines and periodicals. In 1977 the book was reissued by Bantam Books and went on to sell over one million copies.

Rubyfruit Jungle chronicles the life of a young woman named Molly Bolt. Starting with her childhood in Pennsylvania, the book follows her adolescence in Florida and her later adventures in New York. Her relationships with other women are also a major source of focus and conflict in the novel. Many of the events and characters in the book draw from Brown's own early years.

Rubyfruit Jungle fits into the tradition of the picaresque novel, which typically follows the adventures of a socially or financially marginalized protagonist, such as Huck Finn in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The book is unique within the picaresque tradition in that both the protagonist and the author are female.

Author Biography

Rita Mae Brown was born in Pennsylvania in 1944 and moved to Florida during her adolescence. She attended the University of Florida, but was expelled for her participation in a civil rights rally.

She later moved to New York and attended New York University, where she received a degree in Classics and English. Later she received another degree in Cinematography from the New York School of Visual Arts. She also holds a doctorate in Political Science from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.

In the late 1960s, Brown turned her attention to politics. She became interested in several feminist and lesbian rights groups. In 1971 she was instrumental in forming the Furies, a lesbian and feminist group. Also she founded and edited the feminist research journal Quest.

In 1971 she published a book of poetry, The Hand That Cradles the Rock, and a translation of works from the original Latin, Hrotsvitra: Six Medieval Plays.

Her first published novel was entitled Rubyfruit Jungle. Turned down by major presses and agents, the book was finally published by a small feminist press and later purchased by Bantam Books for a wider release. Selling well in its limited first edition, the book went on to sell more than one million copies.

A picaresque, autobiographical novel, Rubyfruit Jungle has been compared to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is widely regarded as the first popular novel with a lesbian protagonist.

In the years following Rubyfruit Jungle, Brown has published eleven novels, two collections of poetry, a book of essays, and a writer's instruction manual. She had also written seven mysteries with feline protagonists, co-credited to her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown. Brown has also won the Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library, and was named Charlottesville's Favorite Author.

Brown has worked in both film and television. She wrote the screenplay for the 1982 horror film Slumber Party Massacre, and provided the voice-over narration for Before Stonewall (1985), a documentary about the gay and lesbian rights movement. Brown also wrote the 1993 made-for-TV movie The Woman Who Loved Elvis.

Plot Summary

Early Years

As Rubyfruit Jungle opens, a young girl named Molly Bolt lives with her adoptive parents in Coffee Hollow, Pennsylvania. An industrious girl, she thinks up a moneymaking scheme with Brockhurst Detwiler, a school friend.

As the only uncircumcised child in the area, Molly charges nickels to look at Brockhurst's pe-nis—and dimes to touch it. When another student tells a teacher, her mother finds out. Irate, her mother informs her that she is adopted and illegitimate.

Shortly after this incident, Molly's Aunt Jenna goes into the hospital to deliver a baby. It lives for only two days and a few weeks later, Jenna dies of cancer. Molly has her first sexual experience in sixth grade with another girl, Leota Bisland. The family moves to Florida.

Florida

In the second section, Molly details her school years in Florida. She struggles to fit in, yet realizes that she is different from her classmates.

She has her first heterosexual experience with her cousin Leroy, who tells her about his own passive homosexual experiences. She enters high school and begins to hang out with a more select, popular clique. After spotting her principal with a teacher in an adulterous meeting, Molly secures financial backing for her successful run at student body presidency.

She has a sexual affair with a female classmate, Carolyn, one of her two best friends. After Carolyn becomes jealous of the time Molly spends with her other best friend, Connie, and accuses Molly of sleeping with her, Molly reveals the affair to Connie. Connie has a strongly homophobic reaction, and Carolyn reacts badly, denying that she is a lesbian. She points out her own feminine traits and Molly's masculine ones.

After high school, Molly attends the University of Florida. She begins a lesbian relationship with her roommate, Faye. After tiring of the cold and silent treatment of the other girls in the dorm, Molly confronts them and reveals her relationship with Faye.

This proves to be disastrous: she is placed under psychiatric care; her scholarship is revoked on moral grounds; and Faye is put into a mental institution. Molly returns home on a Greyhound bus.

New York

When Molly arrives home, her mother announces that she is no longer welcome. Molly hitchhikes to New York. Nearly broke, she spends her first night in New York City sleeping in a car, where she meets her first New Yorker, a young man named Calvin.

Calvin, like Molly, is from Pennsylvania; he too has run away to New York because his family would not accept his sexuality. After taking her to a lesbian bar, Calvin departs for San Francisco. Molly takes a job at The Fling, a clone of the Playboy Club. There she meets Holly, a tall, beautiful black lesbian.

The two women become lovers. Holly reveals that she is a kept woman and encourages Molly to do the same. Molly goes so far as to attend a party to meet a potential sponsor—and even to have lunch with her—but cannot go through with it.

After Holly gets them both fired for assaulting a customer, they have a fight. Holly cannot deal with Molly's moral objection to being a kept woman. Eventually, Holly professes her love for Molly, but to no avail. The third section ends with Holly leaving in a cab.

Coming Home

In the final section of the book, Molly gets a job at the Silver Publishing Company. She has an affair with Polina, a married woman, and nearly consummates a relationship with Polina's other lover, Paul.

Initially repulsed by Molly's sexuality, Polina wants to explore her bisexuality—but Molly cannot handle Polina's sexual fantasies of being a man. She eventually begins a liaison with Polina's daughter Alice. One day, Alice informs her mother that she and Molly are lovers. Her mother banishes Molly from both their lives.

In the aftermath of that incident, Molly leaves New York for a pilgrimage to her hometown in Pennsylvania, where she looks up her first lover. Leota has married and has two children. She thinks that what they did was "perverted."

Returning to New York City for her last year of film school, Molly decides to do her senior project on her mother's life. She once again makes a pilgrimage, this time to her second hometown in Florida. She arrives to find that her mother is dying of an unnamed disease.

Her mother now denies all of the things she said while Molly was growing up. In fact, she wants to make peace with her daughter. Molly films her mother talking about her life, then returns to New York and shows the film.

Characters

Alice Bellantoni

Polina's sixteen-year-old daughter, Alice is described as "a Renaissance princess come back to life." She expresses an active desire to have sex with her mother. She and Molly become lovers, but when Alice informs her mother of their relationship, she is never allowed to see Molly again.

Aunt Jenna

See Jennifer Denman

Polina Belantoni

Polina is a married woman who teaches medieval studies at Columbia University in New York City. When Molly reveals her sexuality to her, Polina reacts in a stereotypically homophobic way: she informs Molly that she is straight and already has a lover, Paul Digita. After seeing her psychiatrist for a while, Polina decides that it is okay for Molly to be a lesbian.

Eventually the two women become lovers. Polina can only achieve sexual climax by acting out fantasies of being a man. Their affair becomes more and more bizarre and ends after Polina's daughter reveals that Molly is her lover as well.

Leota B. Bisland

Leota is Molly's first lover. While the two girls were in the sixth grade, Molly believed that Leota was "the most beautiful girl I had ever seen." When Molly returns to her hometown many years later, she learns that Leota is married and has two children. When Molly asks her if she ever thinks about what happened between them, Leota says no, and goes on to say "anyway, that was perverted, sick."

When Molly professes her happiness as a lesbian, Leota says that she should be institutionalized. Leota represents the unfulfilled lives of women who deny their true selves in order to conform to society's expectations.

Carl Bolt

Carl is Molly's father and always defends her against her mother. After giving Molly his blessing and acceptance, Carl dies of a heart attack. His tolerant and loving attitude toward his daughter is a conscious reworking of expected gender behavior in which the mother is generally shown to be the more sympathetic figure.

Carrie Bolt

Carrie is Molly's adoptive mother. Unfortunately, she is quick to remind Molly that she is illegitimate and not her "real" daughter. At the outset, Carrie is a sharp-tongued woman, and constantly criticizes her daughter for her masculine ways.

Carrie is scandalized by her daughter's election to student body president. She believes that Molly wants to go to college so that she can forget her roots and family. Eventually, they have a serious fight when Carrie learns that Molly is a lesbian. She throws Molly out of the house.

Carrie does not reappear in her daughter's life for many years. When Molly returns to Florida to film Carrie for her senior film project, she is dying of an unnamed disease. Older and wiser, she regrets the way she has treated Molly over the years and yearns for the chance to improve their relationship.

Molly Bolt

The protagonist and narrator of the book, Molly lives with her adoptive parents at the beginning of the story. Yet she never feels completely loved and accepted, because her mother frequently reminds her that she was born an illegitimate orphan.

A lesbian, Molly faces much discrimination as a result of her sexual identity. For example, she is kicked out of college, accused of being mentally ill, and banished from her mother's home when her homosexuality is revealed. She decides to move to New York City to find the more tolerant and creative atmosphere she craves.

Molly symbolizes the liberated woman of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She has more options than women of past generations. Yet while she is able to experiment sexually, she still has trouble finding true love. She is able to pursue higher education at the university level, but faces the same sexist obstacles. Molly still has to search for love and fulfillment like any other character.

Broccoli

See Brockhurst Detwiler

Calvin

A gay, African American street hustler, Calvin is the first person Molly meets in New York. He introduces her to Ronnie Rappaport so she can make money. Raised in Philadelphia, Calvin has run away from a girl he got pregnant in order to convince his father that he wasn't gay.

Calvin serves as a strange mirror image for Molly. Whereas her high school girlfriend was the captain of the cheerleaders, Calvin was having sex with the football team. They both grew up poor, and are both from Pennsylvania. He moves to San Francisco.

Craig

A masculine, young biker, Craig introduces Leroy to gay sex.

Ep Denman

Ep is Leroy's father.

Jennifer Denman

The mother of Leroy and Ted, Jennifer looks like a grandmother at the age of thirty-three. She has a baby named Carl, but it dies two days later. She dies of cancer within two weeks. Jenna is symbolic of the many women trapped in exhausting domestic roles. Her death functions as a metaphor for the psychic "death" that awaits Molly if she decides to conform to society's ideas of femininity.

Leroy Denman

Leroy is Molly's cousin and best friend as a child. He is also her first male lover. After his family moves to Florida, Leroy rebels against society: he gets a wild hairstyle and dresses like the other poor hoodlums in his school.

Leroy is confused about his identity as a male and allows a gay man, Craig, to perform oral sex on him. He becomes less tolerant of Molly's sexuality as he ages.

When Molly sees him when she returns to Florida several years later, Leroy is married with children. He had joined the Marines as a young man, and they "straightened him right out." He still feels close to Molly.

Leroy symbolizes the fears and confusion of men in the new era of greater freedom for women. He is unsure about his role in this changing environment. Like Molly, he too explores his sexuality. While seemingly fine with incest, he is afraid of being perceived as "queer."

Brockhurst Detwiler

Broccoli is a childhood friend of Molly's in Pennsylvania. Broccoli has the distinction of being the only uncircumcised boy in the area, and Molly convinces him to go into business: charge people money to see his penis.

Paul Digita

Paul is Polina's lover. When Molly makes a date with him, he lures her home for sex. He can only achieve orgasm by pretending that he is a woman.

Ruby Drollinger

Ruby is the heroine's biological mother who never appears in the book. Molly's adoptive mother makes reference to her several times. According to Carrie, Ruby was a "bull-headed woman" like her daughter.

Florence

Florence is Molly's aunt and Jennifer's mother. She is noted for staying calm during crisis situations. She dies while Molly is in New York.

Holly

Molly's first lover in New York City, Holly is a tall, beautiful African American lesbian. A "kept woman," she introduces Molly to her benefactor, a well-known actress named Kim Wilson. Holly attempts to get Molly to find a patron of her own.

Molly judges Holly unfavorably because she is a "kept" woman. As a result, the two women fight and they never see each other again. Molly and Holly have almost the same name—similar characters whose moral and personal progression represents the results of very different individual choices.

Miss Marne

Miss Marne is the dean of women at the University of Florida. She places Molly under psychiatric care when Molly's sexuality is revealed. To Molly, Marne appears to be a lesbian herself. It is a well-known fact that Marne lived with the same woman for fifteen years. Forced to hide her identity, Marne is so fearful of being exposed as a lesbian that she punishes the other lesbians on campus.

Mighty Mo

A butch lesbian who tries to pick Molly up in a bar, Mo introduces Molly to the concept of role division within the lesbian community.

The Mouth

See Florence

Connie Pen

Connie is one of Molly's best friends in high school. Connie cannot handle the fact that Molly is a lesbian, but seems find Carolyn acceptable because she denies being gay—even though she admits to having sex with Molly. Her homophobia ends her friendship with Molly.

Leota B. Phantom

See Leota B. Bisland

Faye Raider

Faye is Molly's college roommate. She takes Molly under her wing, buying her clothing and generally taking care of her. She drinks a lot, and takes Molly to her first lesbian bar. Though not professing to be a lesbian, Faye ends up in a relationship with Molly. When the affair is exposed, she leaves school and her parents place her in a psychiatric institution.

Ronnie Rappaport

The son of a rich department store owner, Ronnie can only achieve sexual gratification from being pelted with fruit.

Rhea Rhadin

One of Molly's coworkers at Silver Publishing, Rhea and Molly have a contentious and competitive relationship.

Carolyn Simpson

One of Molly's two best friends in high school, Carolyn "was the school goody two shoes." When first introduced, she is a virgin. Later, she gets drunk in the park and has sex with Molly. Their affair ends when Molly tells Connie that she and Carolyn are lovers. Carolyn responds with defensive homophobia, claiming that she is not a lesbian. Molly finds this unforgivable, and they part company.

Cheryl Spiegelglass

Cheryl is a childhood friend of Molly's in Pennsylvania. After informing Molly that girls can't be doctors, Molly punches her in the mouth.

Earl Stambach

A classmate of Molly's in Pennsylvania, Earl gets her in trouble by telling their teacher about Molly's business with Detwiler.

Themes

Gender

Rubyfruit Jungle explores the impact of gender conditioning. From the very beginning of Molly's childhood, she is under constant pressure to be feminine. Her mother expects Molly to become skilled in cooking, cleaning, and other domestic skills in order to marry, while her adoptive father wants her to go to college. Even her best friend, Leroy Denman, can't understand what Molly wants to be when she gets older.

In an early scene, Molly, Leroy, and another friend named Cheryl decide to play nurses. When Molly announces that she will be a doctor Cheryl disagrees, saying: "You can't be a doctor. Only boys can be doctors. Leroy's got to be the doctor." Molly disagrees and insists that she will be the doctor because she is "the smart one." Cheryl counters with, "It doesn't matter about brains, brains don't count. What counts is whether you are a boy or a girl." Molly promptly punches her in the mouth.

As this vignette makes clear, Molly must fight against the gender expectations from women as well as men.

In the aftermath of Molly's fight with Cheryl, Molly's mother announces that "she's gonna make a lady" out of her, teaching her to "act right, cook, clean, and sew." For her, femininity is constructed from a series of tasks and chores that must be repeated daily. Being female becomes a ritual—a set of proscribed actions that must be invoked day after day. Crucially, these rituals take place in the home. Molly argues that she "can learn them things at night," and should be allowed to explore all day.

Attempting to conciliate, Leroy announces that he, too, will stay in. Molly's mother immediately assaults his masculinity, "telling him what would happen to him if he picked up women's ways … soon they'd take him to the hospital and cut his thing off." For all of these characters, actual confinement within the home symbolizes female experience and identity.

Gender and Sexuality

As a lesbian, Molly is subject to much discrimination. Her mother rejects her, eventually kicking her out of the house. Her former lovers deny their sexuality for fear of being identified as a lesbian. Even as a young girl, Molly knows that society expects her to be heterosexual; therefore, she tries to have boyfriends and subscribe to gender roles as a teenager.

After Leroy and Molly have sex for the first time, Molly becomes the more sexually aggressive partner. For Leroy, this is fundamentally wrong; society has taught him that the man should be the one in control, and Molly should play the passive role in sexual relations.

In fact, Molly's aggressiveness symbolically castrates Leroy—he actually becomes impotent. His sense of self is inextricably linked with society's concepts of correct male and female behavior. When faced with deviation from this norm, he loses power over the totemic symbol of his male identity—the phallus.

Here, as in his brief experimentation with homosexuality, Leroy finds himself the victim of his social conditioning.

Molly's complex negotiations of sex, sexuality and gender act as a sustained critique of the more simplistic versions of sexual liberation in the novel. Although she is celebrated as a lesbian heroine, Molly's sexual experiences are far more complicated and varied than her exalted status in popular culture would imply.

Realizing the limits of her own freedom, Molly has boyfriends to prove her heterosexuality to the worlds of her high school and college. Her first lover is male, and she retains a deeply eroticized relationship with her closest male friends.

For too many of the supporting characters of Rubyfruit Jungle, the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s is seen only as a brief inversion of the status quo. These inversions last only for a short time—usually to vent frustrations—and then order can be restored.

This is seen very clearly in the episode concerning Molly's sexual liaisons with Polina and Polina's lover, Paul. The only way Polina can achieve sexual satisfaction is through her fantasy of being a man. Paul's fantasies involve being treated as a female with large breasts.

The symbolism of their names underscores this inversion of gender roles—Polina is a feminine version of Paul, and Paul the masculine version of Polina.

Style

The Picaresque Novel

Rubyfruit Jungle is considered a prime example of a picaresque novel. This form of literature dates back at least as early as 1554, with the publication of Lazarillo de Tormes. Perhaps the best-known example is Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes. More recent examples include Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

The picaresque genre is structured as a loosely organized series of episodes that detail the journey and adventures of a hero or heroine. Lessons are learned through bitter and humorous experiences. Often, the hero of the picaresque is a marginalized character, either socially or economically.

Topics for Further Study

• Research the defining characteristic and history of the picaresque novel. How much does Molly conform to or diverge from the traditional picaresque hero?
• Investigate the equal rights movements of the sixties and seventies. Is Molly Bolt a radical feminist? Provide reasons for your answer.
• Rubyfruit Jungle was rejected by all the major publishing houses in the United States. Finally published by a small firm, it sold more than seventy thousand copies. Look at the New York Times bestseller lists for 1973 and 1977, the years Brown's novel was published and re-issued. What kind of books consistently made the lists? How were the top sellers of each year different? Why do you think Rubyfruit Jungle became a bestseller?
• Molly Bolt comes of age in a pre-AIDS culture. Research the history of sexual liberation movements in the 1970s and how the AIDs crisis of the 1980s changed perceptions and behavior. How much is Rubyfruit Jungle a product of its time? How might Brown's story be different if it were written in 1993, instead of 1973?

Rubyfruit Jungle follows the conventions of the picaresque in many ways. Molly's journey is as bawdy and sexual as that in Tom Jones. Stylistically, Rubyfruit Jungle has been compared with Twain's picaresque hero; specifically, both protag-onists are orphans, poor, from rural backgrounds, and don't seem to understand the reality of racism.

However, Brown's novel is significantly different from the traditional model. Unlike the characters in most picaresque stories, Molly rarely uses her experiences to learn about herself, but rather to learn about other people. She remains develop-mentally static, and while the lessons are learned, they don't significantly alter her.

Rubyfruit Jungle is also innovative in its choice of a heroine. While Defoe's Moll Flanders was a female picaresque, Rubyfruit Jungle is the first to have both a female character and a female author. Like Defoe's book, Rubyfruit Jungle has a large sexual component—but rather than sexuality as the character's downfall, Brown takes the experiences of the character and uses them to empower and mature her.

While sometimes autobiographical, the picaresque form is often used to employ broad satire and social commentary. Don Quixote has been deemed a satirical political statement about both government and church. Twain utilizes Huckleberry Finn to satirize cultural issues such as racism and child abuse.

In the same way, Brown uses Molly and her adventures to reveal the prejudice inherent in most people's view of minorities. She employs farce, caricature, and absurdity to explore human foibles and failings.

Symbolism

The most obvious significance of the novel's title—Rubyfruit Jungle—is a metaphor for genitalia. As Molly defines it, "I think of [women's] genitals as a, as a ruby fruit jungle … thick and rich and full of hidden treasures."

In the creation of the description and the phrase, Molly is formulating a female-centered set of sexual language and imagery, just as her sexual liberation is mapping out a new terrain of experience. However, the phrase and image have more complex applications. Molly's mother is called Ruby, making Molly the metaphoric "fruit" of Ruby.

The narrative itself, which tracks Molly's journey through hostile rural and urban landscapes, could be considered her "jungle." The title can thus be read as a literal description of the narrative: the fruit of Ruby in her jungle, or, more gracefully phrased, Rubyfruit Jungle.

Molly's encounter with Ronnie reveals another significant meaning for the title. The son of a wealthy department store owner, Ronnie achieves sexual climax by being pelted with fruit; Molly is paid a hundred dollars to throw grapefruits at him. This is her only act of prostitution in the book, and would seem at first to be a celibate act.

If, as Leroy makes so clear, sex is defined as a man touching a woman in the dark, then this episode must be considered as entirely asexual. The direct sexual symbolism of the scenario is fully realized when two things are considered. First, the common grapefruit is also known as the ruby red grapefruit.

Second, when interpreting the scene through Molly's own definition of female genitalia, it is clear that in the purest symbolic sense, she is having sexual intercourse with Ronnie. For Molly Bolt, sexuality is created by a wide variety of acts and relationships.

Historical Context

1973

Rubyfruit Jungle was published in a very tumultuous year in American history. The U. S. military was integrated by gender as the women-only branches were eliminated. The last U.S. combat personnel were withdrawn from Vietnam, officially ending the Vietnam War.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court established a woman's right to abortion. Billie Jean King scored an enormous symbolic victory for female athletes when she beats Bobby Riggs in "The Battle of the Sexes," a televised tennis tournament watched by nearly forty-eight million people.

The 1950s: The Beginning of Civil Rights

The first part of Rubyfruit Jungle is set in the early 1950s. There are no overt signs of racism or segregation because Molly lives in a very segregated area. Yet when Molly's family moves to Florida, she experiences racism for the first time. She discovers that African Americans are considered "separate but equal" by law: they must use separate washrooms, drinking fountains, and even theaters and restaurants.

By the middle of the decade, the civil rights struggle was gaining momentum. In 1955 Rosa Parks symbolizes the movement when she refuses to give up her seat on a public bus. The same year, the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization, was founded in San Francisco.

In 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public transport is unconstitutional. That next year, the court passed the first civil rights legislation since right after the Civil War. Martin Luther King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to fight segregation and achieve civil rights, and on May 17, he spoke to a crowd of 15,000 in Washington, D.C.

The Early to Middle 1960s: Turbulence and Change

In November of 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation in interstate travel. The Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) began the first Freedom rides through the South. The same year the birth control pill became accessible to adult women, which gives women control over reproduction and greater sexual freedom.

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The same year, the Equal Pay Act was passed, assuring women equal pay for equal work. Later that year, the report issued by the President's Commission on the Status of Women documents discrimination against women in virtually every area of American life.

Betty Friedan's best-seller, The Feminine Mystique, explores the "problem that has no name"—the condition of the American woman. Five million copies are sold by 1970, laying the groundwork for the modern feminist movement. The following year, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. In December, Dr. King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Compare & Contrast

• 1973: Gays and lesbians begin to form support groups and lobby to raise public awareness of the important roles of gays and lesbians in so ciety. Discrimination and violence force many homosexuals to hide their sexual identities, and there is no legislation to protect gays and les bians from discrimination on the job.
  
  Today: Although not widely accepted, gays and lesbians have made significant strides in teaching tolerance and fighting ignorance. Hate crimes against homosexuals still occur on a frequent basis, and a "don't ask, don't tell" policy is implemented in the U. S. military. Yet most companies prohibit sexual discrimination against gays and lesbians and steps are taken to legitimize gay marriage in some states, such as Hawaii.
• 1973: A symbolic victory for female athletes is scored when Billie Jean King beats Bobby Riggs in "The Battle of the Sexes," a televised tennis tournament watched by nearly forty-eight million people.
  
  Today: On the heels of the victory of the U. S. women's soccer team and the success of the WNBA, women's athletics are gaining respect and popularity throughout the United States.
• 1972: After languishing since 1923, the Equal Rights amendment (known as the ERA) is passed by Congress on March 22, and sent to individual states for ratification. Hawaii approves it within the hour. By the end of the week, so have Delaware, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Idaho and Iowa. Yet by the end of the decade, political pressures have killed the amendment.
  
  Today: Many feminist groups seek to reintroduce the ERA, hoping that with the more tolerant and enlightened atmosphere it will pass.

Late 1960s and Early 1970s: The Early Feminist Movement

In 1967 the Chicago Women's Liberation Group organized—they are the first women's group to use the term "liberation." Shortly afterward, the New York Radical Women was founded. In 1968 they begin a process of sharing life stories to generate political awareness, a process that becomes known as "consciousness raising." Similar groups are formed all over the country.

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. There were riots and disturbances in 130 cities, with some twenty thousand arrests. New York Radical Women garnered much media attention when they protest the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City.

The first national women's liberation conference was held in Chicago. The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) was founded.

By the end of the 1960s, the crusade for women's rights had made great strides. In 1969, Betty Friedan organized the first Women's Equality Day, August 26, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of women's right to vote. By 1971 more than one hundred newsletters and newspapers focusing on the women's movement were being published across the country. The non-partisan National Women's Political Caucus was founded to encourage women to run for public office.

In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments decreed that "no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Supreme Court ruled that the right to privacy encompasses an unmarried person's right to use contraceptives.

After languishing since 1923, the Equal Rights amendment (known as the ERA) was passed by Congress on March 22, 1973, and sent to individual states for ratification. Hawaii approved it within the hour. By the end of the week, so had Delaware, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Idaho and Iowa.

Critical Overview

Rubyfruit Jungle was initially rejected by several major publishers because its subject matter was considered too controversial for mass market public appeal. First published by a small, independent feminist press, Daughters, Inc., it sold a surprising seventy thousand copies.

During its initial publication run, Rubyfruit Jungle was widely ignored by the major newspapers and magazines. One of the few reviews it received was in Ms., where Marylin Webb called the book "an inspiring, bravado adventure story of a female Huck Finn named Molly Bolt." It was not until Bantam Publishing republished the novel in 1977 that more mainstream reviews began to appear.

New Boston Review's Shelly Temchin Henze traced the parallels between Rubyfruit Jungle and the work of Mark Twain: "Imagine, if you will, Tom Sawyer, only smarter; Huckleberry Finn, only foul-mouthed, female, and lesbian, and you have an idea of Molly Bolt." She asserted that Brown's novel was "a symbol of a movement, a sisterly struggle" and a "classic American success story."

Dismissing those who deem the book revolutionary, she maintained that "Rubyfruit Jungle is not about revolution, nor even particularly about feminism. It is about standing on your own two feet, creaming the competition, looking out for Number One."

In The Village Voice, Bertha Harris underscored the unique character of Molly Bolt. She contended:

While American heroes may occasionally be women, they may not be lesbian. Or if they are, they had better be discreet or at least miserable. Not Molly. She is lusty and lewd and pursues sex with relentless gusto.

Harris also maintained that "much of Molly's world seems a cardboard stage set lighted to reveal only Molly's virtues and those characteristics which mark her as the 'exceptional' lesbian."

However, she turned the faults of the book into good points, contending:

it is exactly this quality of Rubyfruit Jungle which makes it exemplary (for women) of its kind: an American primitive, whose predecessors have dealt only with male heroes. Although Molly Bolt is not a real woman, she is at least the first real image of a heroine in the noble savage, leather-stocking, true-blue bullfighting tradition in this country's literature.

A second Village Voice critic, Terry Curtis Fox, described the novel as a typical coming-of-age story. Fox summarized it as a tale of "sensitive member of outside group heads toward American society and lives to tell the tale."

Fox noted that the protagonist was not strictly aimed at a lesbian audience, noting that "you don't have to be gay or female to identify with Molly Bolt—she is one of the outsiders many of us believe ourselves to be. 'Molly Bolt' can laugh at herself as well as others, and make us laugh too."

Since the publication of Rubyfruit Jungle, it has come to be regarded as both a milestone and a classic. Constantly turning up on top ten lists for gay and lesbian readers, and annually listed on the Index of Censorship's Banned Books List, Rubyfruit Jungle has made a lasting impact on American readers.

Brown's later works have been nowhere near as successful, nor have they garnered as much critical notice or acclaim. In fact, there has been more focus on Brown as a genre writer: a Southern writer, a lesbian writer, or a writer of mysteries. As Annie Gottlieb maintained in The New York Times Book Review, "Ever since Rubyfruit Jungle, Rita Mae Brown's subject has been the misfit between human passions and societal conventions. In her view, sexuality is a first cousin of imagination, involving an irrepressible urge to honor and rival the crazy abundance of life."

She viewed "the comic futility and wasteful pain that Miss Brown sees in the effort to confine desire within the one standard form: respectable heterosexual marriage." While Rubyfruit Jungle is not regarded as a classic of American literature, it remains a popular and influential novel.

Criticism

Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd

Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. In the following essay, she maintains that Rubyfruit Jungle resists easy classification.

Rubyfruit Jungle is a difficult novel to classify in regard to its subject and its genre—as well as its wider cultural reception. Although commentators often label the book as a lesbian, feminist, or Southern novel, Brown's text does not fit in these three simple classifications and is as resistant to stable categorization as feminism, gender difference, or sexuality are to final definitions.

Most often called a "lesbian picaresque," the novel is perhaps best read as a reaction to the gender politics and theories of the 1970s—an exploration of both the benefits and intellectual constraints offered by its feminist and lesbian contemporaries. By sketching the history of lesbian feminist criticism and contextualizing Rubyfruit Jungle within that history, it can be read as a precursor to later theoretical movements—especially the deconstructivist and analytic movements that culminated in Queer theory.

The slippage of categories within Brown's novel, as well as its general refusal to conform to genre labeling, act as a sustained challenge to the biases and assumptions of a liberation politics that was predominantly white and middle class. By tracking the elisions, departures, and slippages of sex, gender, and geography throughout the novel, Rubyfruit Jungle can be seen to be not just a "freak" bestseller, but also a radical renegotiation of the cultural meaning of "freakishness."

Lesbian criticism grew from the political theory and movements of lesbian feminism, as well as the women's and gay liberation movements. Reacting to the homophobia of heterosexual feminists on one hand, and the sexism of gay men on the other, lesbians created new groups and theories for the goal of "lesbian liberation," and lesbian feminism.

Within this new movement, lesbianism was intensely politicized; it was viewed as the way to achieve the ultimate goal of feminism—defeat of the patriarchal power structure. Lesbianism became not so much a form of sexuality as a metaphor for anger—what the radical lesbians collective called "the rage of all women" in their 1970 manifesto, "The Woman-Identified Woman." Lesbian critics began to formulate a perspective on cultural creativity that grew out of the "particularity" of lesbian experience.

In this theory, the lesbian perspective was understood as a unique and singular perspective. Lesbian perspective viewed patriarchal culture as a marginalized outsider, and could be found in literary work as a silenced "Other" who needed to be deciphered.

With this formulation of lesbian experience came the idea that the role of the author was to express her unique lesbian perspective in her texts, while the role of the reader was to find and therefore "decode" them. From this interchange of ideas came the idea that lesbianism frees women from the constraints and oppressions of patriarchy, making lesbians the de facto role models for all women.

In the 1970s lesbian theory started with a set of extremely rigid assumptions: that a category called "lesbian" existed; lesbians share key experiences and ideas; and that literary texts, as well as politics, are generated by lived experience. All of these assumptions were called into question by later theorists.

Critics such as Diana Fuss questioned the "es-sentializing" aspect of this view of lesbian existence, claiming that it constructed only one possible lesbian identity that promoted certain forms of lesbians and lesbianism over others. Instead, they offered an anti-essentialist construction of lesbianism that took into account gender, sexuality, race, and class.

In this way, the lesbian becomes one manifestation of what Teresa de Lauretis calls the "eccentric" subject—a self that is multiple and shifting, continually constructed and reconstructed at the margins, instead of a singular and particularized special category.

Within this cultural history, labeling Rita Mae Brown's book a lesbian or feminist novel has immediate political and theoretical ramifications. In the first instance, it implies the existence of a particular perspective on the construction of sex and gender—an expectation that the text will be an encoded document from the margins which critiques patriarchal culture.

At the same time, "lesbian" is understood to be a unifying, monolithic term that acts as the culmination of all women's rage, regardless of race and class—it excludes all men, regardless of race, class, and sexuality. Feminism is an equally loaded term, implying—again—a presentation of women's shared experience of oppression that writes out class, race, and geography. Nowhere is this more paradigmatically revealed than in a cursory investigation of the label "Southern."

The first and most basic misidentification of Rubyfruit Jungle is that of Southern novel. Molly is one of Teresa de Lauretis "ec-centric" subjects whose life is always in movement. She spends her early childhood in Pennsylvania, before moving to Florida and finally to New York.

Pennsylvania is usually considered either an Appalachian or Eastern seaboard state—neither southern nor northern but somewhere mid-Atlantic. Florida, while geographically southern, is not traditionally considered one of the southern states. Its population is and always has been made up of newcomers—retired people, job seekers, seasonal workers, and immigrants. Lacking the accents and cultural background of the other southern states, Florida is southerly rather than a quintessential part of the American South.

New York figures in Rubyfruit Jungle as the quasi-real, symbolic melting pot of American imagination. When Molly attempts to go home, she is forced to understand that she does not have one: the people who constitute her environment are transient too, and her home is nothing but a shifting landscape. Her first lover is now a married woman with children—she has "crossed the border," giving up her ambiguous sexuality and going to the clearly defined areas of wife, mother, and heterosexual.

What Do I Read Next?

• Six of One (1983) is Rita Mae Brown's novel about love, war, and sibling rivalry.
• Brown's novel, Sudden Death (1984), tells the story of sex, betrayal, ambition, and greed amongst professional women tennis players.
• The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling (1749), written by Henry Fielding, explores every facet of eighteenth-century English society from brothels to drawing rooms. The protagonist of the book, Tom Jones, is a picaresque hero—an adventurer with a conscience who has many sexual adventures before getting married.
• Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1954) is a picaresque novel that recounts the life of a Jewish man.
• Lisa Alther's 1976 bestseller, Kinflicks chronicles the story of a young woman who discovers the joys of liberation and sexual experimentation in the 1960s.
• The Well of Loneliness (1928) is Radclyffe Hall's groundbreaking and controversial novel about a lesbian's search for happiness.

Molly's development therefore takes place in border states and spaces for explicit symbolic purposes. In an extended conceit, the text plays with the double meaning of the word "state." Molly travels between states—Pennsylvania, Florida, New York—as she moves between "states" of life and identity—childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The geographical doubling and redoubling parallels her precarious travels towards maturity in a topography that she must constitute herself.

Unable to fit into the metaphoric landscape of the heterosexual state/states, Molly territorializes her own. Tellingly, the actual states in which she lives are archetypally transitional, just like her uneasy transition between archetypes of femininity.

Taken from a border state and going first to a southern and then a northern context, Molly adapts herself, her speech, behavior, and even her wardrobe, to fit into her new environments. Even her name changes—from Brown to Bolt—reflecting her constant self-inscription, as well as signifying her perpetual motion: "bolt-ing."

Rubyfruit Jungle is densely layered with investigations into the role of gender conditioning, but it resists categorization as simply a feminist text, especially within the expectations of the period in which it was written. Molly's rebelliousness is neither radical nor reformist feminism. Instead, it is based on her own socioeconomic background, and the complex role that race, class, and gender play in the creation of her options and opportunities.

This perspective reaches its culmination in her film school senior project. While the other students—all male—are making projects based around violence that self-consciously attempt to reject social and cinematic conventions, Molly's project is a traditional narrative—a documentary that tracks her mother as she goes about her life. In creating a "realistic" document of this kind, Molly rejects the cultural politics that demand a unique outsider perspective in the creation of "radical" art.

The alignment of narrative experimentation with the privileged middle class forces the reader to accept Molly's realistic style—as well as the novel's—as a class-based response to the elitism of the cultural avant-garde.

Just as Molly rejects the option of experimenting in the service of feminist particularization, so Rubyfruit Jungle resists a narrative of gender creation in which women are constructed and men constructing. Throughout the text, it is the adult women who inculcate gender in both boys and girls, and both sexes experience being "gendered" as one of delimitation and destruction. Molly and Leroy have their genders forced onto them by their parents, their contemporaries, and finally themselves.

In a critical early scene, they play "nurse" with a friend. When Molly announces that she will be a doctor, she is told that she can't: "Only boys can be doctors. Leroy's got to be the doctor._ What counts is whether you are a boy or a girl." In the aftermath of the violence that ensues, both Molly and Leroy experience an intensification of "gendering."

For Molly this means being literally locked into her proscribed female space—the home. For Leroy it means threatened castration if he stays inside: "soon they'd take him to the hospital and cut his thing off." Later, when Molly acts as the sexual aggressor, Leroy's childhood lessons show themselves: slippage from ideal gender behavior causes him to become impotent. Acting out the internalized fears from him childhood, Leroy "castrates" himself rather than perform in a female role.

Molly's complex negotiations of sex, sexuality, and gender function as a sustained critique of the more simplistic versions of sexual liberation in the novel, and undermine all of the key assumptions inherent in 1970s lesbian feminism. Her sexual experiences are far more complicated and varied than the unitary theories of a lesbian perspective allow.

Neither the novel nor Molly presents a stable definition of the category "lesbian," an essential prerequisite to constructing lesbian theory. Traveling through the underworld of gay and lesbian New York, Molly finds and rejects many people, none of whom conform to narrowly defined types, and all of whom are constructed as much by their gender, class, and race as they by their sexuality.

In experimenting with and ultimately rejecting various forms of self-defined lesbianism, Molly uncovers much diversity. Ranging from the "butch and femme" couples who enact male/female stereotypes, to the liberated women who are kept by mistresses, Rubyfruit Jungle explores the different ways lesbians interact and live in contemporary society.

Molly is self-conscious about her sexuality, adapting to societal norms in the same way that she changes her clothing and her accent. She has boyfriends in high school and college, and she retains a deeply eroticized relationship with her closest male friends. In doing so, she "bolts" away from the confining stereotypes of gender-appropriate sexuality or politically expedient labeling.

For too many of the supporting characters of Rubyfruit Jungle, the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s is seen as a chance for inversion or destruction of the status quo. Both simple rejection and binary opposition are consistently presented as an insidious form of acceptance in Brown's text.

Instead of validating the patriarchal power structure by becoming its "Other"—the "rage of all women"—Molly refuses to ignore the class dynamics that tie her to Leroy, or the gender politics that separate her from her Mother. She is not Every-woman, but one woman in an "ec-centric" orbit through her culture, escaping from labels of the kind that are printed on the cover of every copy of Rubyfruit Jungle.

Source: Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000.

Sources

Terry Curtis Fox, in a review in The Village Voice, October 9, 1978.

Annie Gottlieb, "Passion and Punishment," in New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1982, p. 10.

Bertha Harris, in a review in The Village Voice, September 12, 1977.

Shelly Temchin Henze, in a review in New Boston Review, April-May, 1970.

Marylin Webb, in a review in Ms., March, 1974.

For Further Study

Carol Marie Brown, Rita Mae Brown, Twayne, 1993, 191 p.

A biographical and critical study. The author also discusses the parallels between the lives of Brown's characters and her own experiences.

Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, Simon & Schuster, 1999, 716 p.

An exhaustive account of the struggle for equal rights for homosexuals in the twentieth century.

Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 416 p.

The first full-length study of radical feminism from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.

Leslie Fishbein, "Ruby Fruit Jungle: Lesbianism, Feminism, and Narcissism," in the International Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 7. No. 2, March-April, 1984.

An in-depth examination of Brown's major themes.

Diane Silver, The New Civil War: The Lesbian and Gay Struggle for Civil Rights (The Lesbian and Gay Experience), Franklin Watts, 1997, 191 p.

Aimed at a high school audience, this book includes a brief survey of historical perspectives on homosexuality and an examination of the diversity of contemporary gay and lesbian life in the United States.