Was Lady Macbeth the author or the victim of her husband’s ambition? Was Bertha Rochester truly mad or just unwilling to submit to the confines of marriage? But from its very first page, “Tracy Flick Can’t Win” takes a much harder look at the toxic male culture that was taken for granted in “Election.”įor decades, feminist deconstructions of literature have reframed female characters and excavated the ways they have been used by mostly male authors. This is not the point of the book there is no enormous revelation after which everything falls into place, no decades-old accusation made or retribution sought. When her boss decides to retire, she seems to be on track to advance, but only if she can once again avoid being thwarted by some of the same sexism she faced back in the '90s.Īlong the way, Tracy, like her creator, realizes that her infamous “affair” was more a case of grooming and abuse than she had ever let herself believe. There Tracy, now middle-aged and a bit cowed by life, serves as assistant principal. Falcone's story is told in “ Tracy Flick Can’t Win," but the novel is a sequel to “Election” in that it sends both Perrotta and Tracy back to high school, albeit Green Meadows High rather than Winwood. So Tracy being Tracy wound up not only in the new book but headlining it. Yet when he began writing that book, centered on a man named Vito Falcone, Perrotta found himself using the same sort of multiple-viewpoint, oral history-style narration that he used in “Election." Before he knew it, he "felt Tracy poking up her hand, saying, ‘Let me in on this.’ Because in a way, Falcone is one of those guys who were always getting in her way.” Fletcher" in 2017, was a book about a former high school football player "with a head injury who came back to his high school to be honored." What he wanted to do next, after publishing "Mrs. "There's no way a girl of 15 could choose that."īut Perrotta's career had moved far away from Tracy. "In the years since I wrote that, the paradigm shifted completely," he added. “Some women said, ‘That teacher ruined my life’ other women said, ‘I didn’t think about it as abuse until much later.’ It did make me think about how I had written about Tracy it nagged at me. “In the #MeToo moment, there were a bunch of stories about teachers who had these relationships with students,” he said during a Zoom conversation. That gave him a few second thoughts about "Election." In recent years, Perrotta has, like many people, experienced a new level of awareness about the often tragically blurred line between consent and abuse. In both versions, Tracy triumphs and McAllister is fired, but in neither version does anyone question whether a 15-year-old can actually “have an affair” with her high school teacher. And so he attempts to sabotage her campaign for student president. McAllister (played by Matthew Broderick in the film) is frustrated that his colleague has been fired for having “an affair” with Tracy, from which Tracy has - so he thinks - emerged unscathed. Those issues lie at the heart of "Election": History teacher Mr. Not when "Tracy Flick" became politicized, made into shorthand for a certain kind of female politician, or even when #MeToo forced the country to question many misguided assumptions about gender power dynamics and the role sex plays in them.
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