Essay Questions

Who is Aunt Victoria, really?

Aunt Victoria keeps her stash of personal food locked up in a metal pantry. She’s got a voice that sounds like it is emanating from the grossly swollen stomach buried impenetrably beneath layers of blubber. She is a humorless wasteland of flesh apparently oblivious to the inherent potential for Naugahyde to create unpleasant sounds. Eventually, she will literally cause the foundation to collapse under the weight of her horrific presence and what is most ironic of all about Aunt Victoria is not only that she isn’t even an aunt or a blood relation, but the even the law does not recognize her right to intrude upon the lives of Bess and Hal because she was the unmarried lesbian lover of their mother.

What textual indications are present that reveal Kevin’s concept of Madeline as “A Perfect Lawn” is nothing but illusion?

Kevin is a stalker, no question, but he not a particularly dangerous one, it seems. He is obsessed with the cheerleader whose strength makes her the anchor of the pyramid. For Kevin, she truly is perfect, but Kevin is kidding himself. Irony and paradox is persistent throughout the text when it comes to describing the girl. Madeline is recognized “as a forthright girl, no doubt about it, but her eyes were as cool green as the perfect lawn” in a moment of dubious reality. Kevin, despite spending practically every waking moment concentrating his gaze on her, never has occasion to realize “that the beautiful Madeline would be heavy, heavier than him” and so, when trying to rescue her from the potential threat of a fire, is subject to getting punched and slapped by the damsel almost undressed rather than simply lifting her up and out like the hero he envisions. She thinks nothing of casually referring to him as a “gross thing” and “Retardo-Kevin.” Madeline is far from a perfect lawn. In fact, she is more deserving of the term he applies to her actual lawn “a travesty.”