Females in The Tribes of Palos Verdes
The Tribes of Palos Verdes is a novel that mainly relates to a family with twin teenagers during the late 1970’s and early1980’s, and how their lives change when they move to Palos Verdes, California. It is written in the first person, from the point of view of one of the twins, Medina.
Palos Verdes, according to this book, is a beach community that is upper class and exclusive. The people who live there are used to plastic surgeries and tennis skirts. These two things precisely connect females and beauty. Although at the time feminism had been growing and entering another stage, we can still see that most of the females in this book have an image that is created by males and doctors. Sandy (Medina’s mother) seems like one of the victims of these circumstances. She used to be a model, but now she is too sick to live like that— keeping a beautiful figure and appearance. She starts over-eating in spite of the fact that she is discontent and upset with losing her figure. The yellow bathrobe she always wears represents the image of butter or something that is fatty or ordinary. Because of her financial dependence and the unfair nature of their relationship, she makes herself a weapon against the pretence of beauty, and focuses on avenging herself on her husband (Phil) for his affairs. The character of Sandy in this book is a complete failure, the symbol of a stray woman, wife, and mother in those years, self-contradictory and pathetic.
Being an opposite female character of Sandy, Medina is more like a forerunner of the sex-positive feminist—who believes that women can be more independent and liberated in their sex lives. The movement toward sex-positive feminism was just beginning in the early 1980s. We can easily notice the liberal ideas in Medina’s neutral behavior from the judgments of the ‘bay boys’—they always taunt her that she could have sex with anyone.
Since the situations she is involved in— she is not a popular girl at school, her mother doesn’t treat her fairly— she says, “Sometimes I dream I’m a boy.”(p.15) This private utterance could be regarded as sexual curiosity, psychological jealousy, or merely a fantasy that she wants to be stronger. Thus, surfing is likely the best means of training and proving. Also, she regards it as a successful way of escaping her dysfunctional and broken family.
The tortoise in this book is an interesting symbol of Medina. On the outside of the soft body (female gender), they both have a hard shell to protect themselves from attack, even though they are not good looking. They might not be extraordinary at first, but they can live for a long time, just like Medina who proves at the end of the book that she is a survivor. The tortoise also foreshadows the slow but steady positive progress of the women’s movement.
However, on the other hand, if we look toward her brother (Jim), there is no success there. If we were to regard Jim as an anther female character in this book— because of his girlish personality and tendency of being a mama’s boy— he would be just another minority at that time; a smaller, weaker one such as gay people, black women or third world women.
That some people die and some survive is part of the process of any movement. The author (Joy Nicholson) realizes that disadvantageous situations exist and shows these ideas in her writing, which deserves compliments. Moreover, the psychologies of the twin teenagers and the divorced mother are lightly spattered as sparks throughout this book even though some of them are not perfectly appealing or surprising, which is readable as well.
