the formal gesture

I think what I was aiming for was not only the formal gesture ("I Stand Alone"), where the camera does the work of sort of "making it okay" by me that this thing has happened, but the (perhaps)intellectual gesture that shows up in literary fiction from time to time, in which our established notions of morality are questioned. I used the example of one of my own stories because I couldn't think of another one of the top of my head, but it's not like I invented this,and generally speaking I don't do it as well as I wish I could do it,but - by and large - it seems to be the "gesture" that I gravitate toward.

The one example is the story in Product, where this woman gives her elderly stepfather (who'd molested her when she was a child) a hand job. He's all crippled and helpless on the bed, and he's lost control of his bowels, and it's all sort of gross, and on top of that there's the incest business that is generally considered morally repugnant, and what I was attempting to do was frame the hand job as an act of mercy, the idea being that reader will say, "oh, that was sweet of her." And like her better now, rather than saying "hey, that's incest, and incest, as well all know, is bad."
Rick was the one - incidentally - who suggested this ending, four years ago.

So I'm trying to think back on novels I've read, and the easiest one I can come up with makes me feel a little queasy, because - while I really enjoyed it at fourteen - I suspect I would find it a bit maudlin or sentimental, or something, now, and that's "Of Mice and Men," where - and as I said it was over twenty years ago I read it, so I may have read wrong - I was left to wonder whether I was looking at a mercy killing or at George making his own life a lot easier or both.
Another obvious example is "Beloved," where the act of killing your children has some moral ambiguity (seen as it is as an attempt to rescue them from slavery). Of course, I don't think the novel ever really says that killing the children was okay, exactly, but it does follow this character around - this woman who killed her children -with a great deal of compassion. So that perhaps be another example.

Trouble is the book is dull as dirt.

Chekhov does this business, too, though. In a story called "About Love," in "Lady with a Little Dog," adulterous affairs are the "trueloves," and marriage is treated as a stifling social institution that's in the way.

Anyone have better examples?

[originally posted by Sam Ruddick]