The World According To Garp

“That dog was a killer, protected by one of the many thin and senseless bits of logic that the upper classes in America are famous for: namely, that the children and pets of the aristocracy couldn’t possibly be too free, or hurt anybody. That other people should not overpopulate the world, or be allowed to release their dogs, but that the dogs and children of rich people have a right to run free.” 

The Percy family’s unusually aggressive Newfoundland, Bonkers, presents many problems for Garp. Like the Percy children, Bonkers is allowed to run free and go undisciplined even after harming people. Bonkers remains a symbol of the upper echelons that marginalize Garp and Jenny before Jenny becomes wealthy. 

“Garp’s conviction that Franz Grillparzer was a ‘bad’ writer seemed to provide the young man with his first real confidence as an artist—even before he had written anything. Perhaps in every writer’s life there needs to be that moment when some other writer is attacked as unworthy of the job. Garp’s killer instinct in regard to poor Grillparzer was almost a wrestling secret; it was as if Garp had observed an opponent in a match with another wrestler; spotting the weaknesses, Garp knew he could do better.” 

Garp’s career confidence is bolstered by comparing himself to others. Even though, at this point in his life, he has received mostly criticism for his literary output, he is still convinced that he can be a better writer than Grillparzer. His wrestling background remains a source of comfort for Garp, who uses his athletic prowess and strategies to help him tackle the challenges of living in the world. 

“As for Jenny, she felt only that women—just like men—should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.” 

Jenny’s reluctance to label herself a feminist can be frustrating for the other characters; she seems to embrace the label only by default. Even though Jenny is very much a revolutionary in her own way, she is still cautiously pessimistic about labels that patriarchal figures in her life have taught her to regard with suspicion. Jenny constantly demonstrates that she cares little for traditional gender roles and believes herself to be an equal of men, but societal toxicity toward second-wave feminism still makes her hesitant. 

“When the interviewer discovered Garp’s chosen life, his ‘housewife’s role,’ as she gleefully called it, Garp blew up at her. ‘I’m doing what I want to do,’ he said. ‘Don’t call it by any other name. I’m just doing what I want to do—and that’s all my mother ever did, too. Just what she wanted to do.’”

Garp is not a model feminist, but he is certainly protective of his mom’s choices. It is not until he is more in the public eye that Garp starts to worry about others’ perception of his and Helen’s division of labor within their marriage. For the most part, he is content to remain at home and take on most of the cooking and childcare responsibilities while Helen works outside the home as a university English professor. Part of this choice stems from his considerable anxiety; Garp constantly fears for the lives of his children and needs to constantly supervise them to assuage those fears.

“Garp didn’t want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.” 

Part of Garp’s anxiety surrounding gender roles stems from his conviction that all men, including himself, are terrible and cannot be changed. While he is admirable in that he is fairly supportive of his mother and wife, he remains unapologetically lustful toward other women and suggests that his wife just needs to accept his wandering eye. Garp has witnessed considerable violence toward women, but he does not try to fix the men who commit this violence, nor does he try to engineer any kind of institutionalized change.

“It had been an unpleasant sensation for Garp, shortly after Duncan turned six, to smell that Duncan’s breath was stale and faintly foul in his sleep. It was as if the process of decay, of slowly dying, was already begun in him. This was Garp’s first awareness of the mortality of his son. There appeared with this odor the first discolorations and stains on Duncan’s perfect teeth. Perhaps it was just that Duncan was Garp’s firstborn child, but Garp worried more about Duncan than he worried about Walt—even though a five-year-old seems more prone (than a ten-year-old) to the usual childhood accidents. And what are they? Garp wondered. Being hit by cars? Choking to death on peanuts? Being stolen by strangers? Cancer, for example, was a stranger.”

Garp has considerable anxiety about mortality in general, but especially around the mortality of his children. He constantly fears all the things that can happen to them; ironically, Walt’s death is brought about because Garp is reacting to an attempt to suppress his own fear. As a parent, Garp feels he needs to employ constant vigilance, but this constant vigilance is not sustainable in the face of his own lust, insecurity, and jealousy.

“There is the faint, trapped warble from some televisions tuned in to The Late Show, and the blue-gray glow from the picture tubes throbs from a few of the houses. To Garp this glow looks like cancer, insidious and numbing, putting the world to sleep. Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.” 

Like many writers, Garp craves the intimacy of the written word, believing there to be a deeper connection between a reader and literature than between a viewer of any other art form. Garp fears the encroaching influence of television, not just because it will reduce his readership but also because he believes it will reduce the intimacy created by literature between strangers in an increasingly disconnected world. 

“What attracted Michael Milton to Helen was what attracted many men and few women to her. She was, in her thirties, an alluring woman not simply because she was beautiful but because she was perfect-looking.” 

While Irving sometimes makes admirable strides in presenting feminist ideals, his description of Helen as “perfect-looking” creates a laughably unattainable standard of beauty. Helen is dehumanized through such descriptions, and it diminishes her as a character. The description also could be viewed as lazy writing on Irving’s part; what does “perfect” look like? However, this quote can also be interpreted as being filtered through the lens of Michael Milton’s perception; is Irving committing lazy writing, or does this thought belong to Michael?

“She was not sure if she wanted to love this young man or groom him.” 

When Helen first meets Michael Milton, she is entranced by his consciously pretentious airs, but his facial hair leaves much to be desired. Echoing Jenny’s famous autobiographical line about women being considered either wives or “whores,” Helen also faces a dichotomy of taking a younger lover or acting as his mother. She is initially attracted to the idea of acting as a “whore” as a means of experiencing freedom, but she reverts to a motherly mindset and feels responsible for Michael’s improvement.

“Helen, he knew, was reading someone else. It did not occur to Garp that she might be contemplating more than literature, but he saw with a typical writer’s jealousy that someone else’s words were keeping her up at night.” 

Garp craves and celebrates the intimacy of the written word and believes that the strength of his marriage stems from the fact that Helen is his most trusted reader and critic. Their relationship was founded on her honest critiques of his writing, and he does not believe that he needs to feel insecure about this until he realizes that Helen offers similar critiques to Michael Milton. 

“So it’s the open road for training, but it’s the suburbs I'm training for. In my condition I am more than a match for a car caught speeding in my neighborhood.” 

Many of Garp’s embedded narratives reflect what is going on in his real life, though Garp struggles to admit how much of his writing is inspired by autobiography. Like Garp, his suburban vigilante chases speeding cars under the guise of protecting children. Also like Garp, the vigilante seems to be getting more out of this than the children do. 

“It was his imagination that was keeping him up, Helen told him; one sign that he hadn’t been writing enough, Garp knew, was when he had too much imagination left over for other things. For example, the onslaught of dreams: Garp now dreamed only of horrors happening to his children.” 

Garp’s anxiety is somewhat lessened when he is writing effectively and frequently. Helen knows this, but Garp struggles to accept it. Helen understands the depths of Garp’s anxiety (and her own), but she is the only one who makes an effort to manage those anxieties so that they can both function more effectively. 

“Getting used to having one eye is something like getting used to the world through a camera; there are similarities in depth of field, and in the problems of focus.”

The motif of disability appears frequently in the novel, and here Irving shows how disabilities can enable other kinds of abilities. After losing one eye in a car accident, Duncan is forced to see the world in a different way. While his accident was traumatic and horrible, he does credit it with inspiring him to view the world as an artist. 

“There was more than a hint of distaste in Roberta’s references to homosexuals, and Garp thought it strange that people in the process of making a decision that will plant them firmly in a minority, forever, are possibly less tolerant of other minorities than we might imagine […] Roberta’s vehemence was not unique; Garp pondered how these other women in his mother’s house, and in her care, had all been victims of intolerance—yet most of them he’d met seemed especially intolerant of each other.”

Garp’s view of gender roles and expectations is complicated, and he seems almost determined to pit Roberta against the other women that his mom has helped. Rather than attempting to see and recognize the various difficulties experienced by Roberta and the other women, Garp instead views them with a critical lens. Garp superficially sees Roberta and Jenny’s followers only as “other” (outside mainstream ideas of “acceptability”), and he wonders why what he sees as a shared experience of otherness doesn’t generate automatic solidarity.

“Garp knew what terror would lurk at the heart of his book, and perhaps for that reason he approached it through a character as distant from his personal anxiety as the police inspector is distant from the crime.”

The looming Under Toad of anxiety and fear of death appears in everything that Garp writes, and he fears being pigeonholed as a writer who can only describe personal experiences. Unwilling to let his works be known solely for their autobiographical elements, Garp seeks to separate himself from his written work. Garp aligns himself with Bensenhaver, believing he can assume the role of a detached viewer whose powers of observation are strengthened through confidence in his objectivity.

“The bloody, praying woman, naked and caked with grit, took no notice of him driving past her. The driver had a vision of an angel on a trip back from hell.” 

In this excerpt from The World According to Bensenhaver, Hope Standish flees Oren’s pickup truck and is witnessed by a passerby who finds her appearance so distracting that he immediately crashes. Irving’s use of “angel” throughout the novel offers interesting contradictions. Hope and Margie Tallworth are presented as angels with a vendetta; Margie is prepared to tell Garp of Helen’s affair “like an avenging angel” (298). Garp also describes angels as companions of anxiety. Hope’s husband “continues to support the old policeman as a kind of hovering angel” (382), and Garp views the Angel of Death as “midwife to the Under Toad” (414). 

 “Somehow implicit in the novel is the sense that women are better equipped than men at enduring fear and brutality, and at containing the anxiousness of feeling how vulnerable we are to the people we love. Hope is seen as a strong survivor of a weak man’s world.” 

This review of The World According to Bensenhaver notes one of the flaws of Garp’s brand of feminism. Garp sees and is willing to learn more about the many consequences of institutionalized sexism, such as violence against women, but he uses this knowledge to argue that women are superior to men rather than trying to find ways to combat institutionalized sexism. Garp suggests that women are superior because they are inherently stronger and better equipped to deal with trauma; while he thinks he is complimenting women’s strength, he is only further objectifying them. 

“‘Lawd!’ Jillsy screamed. ‘You’d think it was him who got raped, the way he went on and on. If you ask me,’ Jillsy said, ‘that’s just like men: rape you half to death one minute and the next minute go crazy fussin’ over who you’re givin’ it to—of your own free will! It’s not their damn business, either way, is it?’”

John Wolf elects Jillsy as his unconventional litmus test of a reader to determine if a book will sell well. Jillsy occupies a very marginalized position within the text; she is one of the few characters who is explicitly identified as a person of color, as well as one of the few characters of a lower class who makes an impact on the narrative. Though the diegetic world of the text does not treat her well, Jillsy’s astute observations make her a powerful critic of the diegetic narrative. 

“Garp always said that the question he most hated to be asked, about his work, was how much of it was ‘true’—how much of it was based on ‘personal experience.’ True—not in the good way that Jillsy Sloper used it, but true as in ‘real life.’ Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the autobiographical basis—if there even was one—was the least interesting level on which to read a novel.” 

Garp loathes readers’ assumptions that his writings are purely autobiographical, viewing these assumptions as an insult to his creative powers. He differentiates between the truth of his own life and the truth of life in general, urging readers to understand that a novel based on his own life events is far less interesting than a novel based on universal truths that everyone can access and experience. As a young writer, Garp was determined to experience life so that he could become a better writer; as an older author, he is annoyed that so much of his life experience trickles into his writing. 

“Thus he missed, thankfully, the ‘dissenting feminist opinion’ of The World According to Bensenhaver, published in a giddy, popular magazine. The novel, the reviewer said, ‘steadfastly upholds the sexist notion that women are chiefly an assemblage of orifices and the acceptable prey of predatory males […] T. S. Garp continues the infuriating male mythology: the good man is the bodyguard of his family, the good woman never willingly lets another man enter her literal or figurative door.’” 

This critique of The World According to Bensenhaver asserts that Garp’s view of women is not as positive as he believes. The reviewer names the double standard that plays out in Garp’s marriage: He believes that he should be allowed to sleep with whatever woman he wants (because he is a lustful man who cannot be expected to control his urges), but Helen, as a woman, is expected to maintain perfect monogamy.

“No man is a woman’s friend.”  

Garp’s particular brand of feminism often appears problematic in that he ascribes positive strength to women but does not believe men have any obligation to consider or amend their own behaviors. While the term “weaponized incompetence” was not in use at the time of the novel’s publication, a critique of Garp would be incomplete without considering that idea. Garp makes sure to broadcast his shortcomings without making any effort to improve upon them, primarily because he believes those shortcomings are inherent to his maleness. 

“Garp felt ashamed. He felt ashamed of other people.”

When a cab driver says Sally Devlin was unable to control herself because she became emotional over Jenny Fields’s assassination, Garp quickly aims at other people the shame he feels about the cabby’s sexist judgment. Though Garp has tremendous capacity for introspection, he often deflects blame and views other men as the problem instead of considering how he might improve his own behaviors.

“Her theory would later be expressed by the critic A. J. Harms, who claimed that Garp’s work was progressively weakened by its closer and closer parallels to his personal history.” 

Garp fears being pigeonholed by autobiographical interpretations of his work. As he grows as a writer, he finds himself more creatively bogged down by his own life. The more he tries to separate his works from his own trauma and his own experiences, the more he relies on this trauma to give depth to his writing.