By Rita Mae Brown
Defiant lesbian coming-of-age picaresque
Subject
Themes
Molly Bolt is born illegitimate and adopted by Carl and Carrie Bolt, a working-class couple in Coffee Hollow, Pennsylvania. From her earliest years, she demonstrates a precocious intelligence and an absolute refusal to conform. She runs childhood scams, punches bullies, and locks her adoptive mother in the root cellar when Carrie tries to confine her to domestic lessons. Carrie wields Molly's adoption as a weapon during arguments, calling her a bastard, but Carl quietly champions her, insisting she will go to college and make something of herself.
Molly Bolt is born illegitimate and adopted by Carl and Carrie Bolt, a working-class couple in Coffee Hollow, Pennsylvania. From her earliest years, she demonstrates a precocious intelligence and an absolute refusal to conform. She runs childhood scams, punches bullies, and locks her adoptive mother…
Published in 1973, Rubyfruit Jungle arrived at a moment of extraordinary cultural upheaval for lesbian and gay Americans. The Stonewall riots of June 1969 had catalysed the modern gay liberation movement, and organisations such as the Gay Liberation Front and the Lavender Menace were challenging…
From the moment Carrie calls her a bastard, Molly Bolt exists outside the categories that others attempt to impose on her. She is illegitimate, adopted, poor, Southern, female, and lesbian, but she refuses to allow any of these designations to define her. "I got myself born, that's what counts," she…
Molly Bolt's life is shaped by three interlocking systems of exclusion: class, gender, and sexuality. What makes the narrative's treatment of these systems distinctive is its refusal to separate them. They operate simultaneously, reinforcing one another at every turn, and Molly experiences them not…
Laughter runs through the narrative like a lifeline. From Molly's earliest childhood schemes to her final defiant declaration about being the hottest fifty-year-old this side of the Mississippi, humour is the primary tool she uses to survive a world that repeatedly tries to destroy her. It is not…
The narrative follows the structure of a picaresque, a form dating back to sixteenth-century Spanish literature in which a roguish, lower-class protagonist survives by wit and nerve through a corrupt society. Molly Bolt fits the archetype with remarkable precision. She is born outside respectable…
Nearly every character Molly encounters is performing a version of themselves designed for public consumption, and the central tension of the narrative is Molly's insistence on being genuine in a world that rewards pretence. This conflict between authenticity and performance operates at every level…
Molly Bolt is a force of nature from her very first breath. Born illegitimate in a coffee can in Shiloh, Pennsylvania, adopted by Carl and Carrie Bolt, and raised in the rural South, she enters the world already marked as an outsider. Rather than shrinking from this designation, she claims it,…
Carrie Bolt is the adoptive mother who shapes Molly's world from the very beginning, and the contradictions within her character form one of the most emotionally resonant threads in the narrative. She is domineering, bigoted, sharp-tongued, and possessed of politics "to the right of Genghis Khan,"…
Leroy is Molly's childhood companion and the closest thing she has to a sibling during her years in the hollow and later in Fort Lauderdale. Their relationship is one of genuine affection and mutual loyalty, but it is also shaped by the racial dynamics of the American South and by the divergent…
Connie Pen enters Molly's life during high school and quickly becomes one third of the "gleesome threesome" alongside Carolyn Simpson. She is intelligent, sharp-witted, and shares Molly's irreverent view of the world. Together they devise pranks, manipulate classmates, and treat the social…
Molly Bolt is seven years old and living in Coffee Hollow, a poor rural community outside York, Pennsylvania, when she discovers two truths that will shape her life: money is power, and she belongs to nobody. The first revelation comes through entrepreneurial instinct. Her classmate Brockhurst…
Violence arrives at the Denman household one evening when Ep, Leroy's father, staggers in covered in blood. He had fought a man named Layton at the shop after Layton boasted about his son's appointment to West Point and mocked Ep's boys as stupid. Ep beat him, and Layton pulled a knife. Florence…
In sixth grade, Molly becomes captivated by Leota B. Bisland, a tall, slender girl with creamy skin and deep green eyes. She spends the school year trying to make Leota laugh, earning herself both trouble and the lead role of the Virgin Mary in the Christmas pageant. Cheryl Spiegelglass, cast as…
At Fort Lauderdale High, Molly thrives while Leroy deteriorates. He flunks repeatedly, buys a Bonneville Triumph she can drive better than he can, and calls her a dyke when she refuses to conform. Craig, his older lover, has left the county, and Leroy now claims straightness with the fervour of the…
Senior year grants Molly and Connie Pen an unprecedented degree of freedom. Mr Beers writes them blue freedom slips on demand, and the two cruise through their final months with boys who serve as decorative social props, none of them mattering in any serious way. One Friday night, however, the…
Molly returns to Fort Lauderdale, but Carrie already knows everything; the dean of women has telephoned. "A queer, I raised a queer," Carrie shrieks, and orders Molly out of the house. With fourteen dollars and sixty-one cents in her pocket, Molly hitches north to New York City. A Georgian family…
Molly wins a tuition scholarship to NYU's film school after months of bureaucratic struggle and entrance exams. She takes classes during the day and works nights at The Flick, pushing herself through exhaustion with the conviction that talent and persistence will carry her to the top. Holly, who…
Polina vanishes for three weeks after learning Molly is a lesbian. When she finally calls, she reports that after many visits to her psychiatrist, she has concluded it is acceptable for Molly to be whatever she wants, as long as she is a mature and healthy human being. They resume their friendship,…
For her senior film project, Molly steals a camera from NYU because male classmates have blocked her from the equipment sign-out sheet. She takes a bus to Fort Lauderdale. She has not been home in six years. Carrie opens the door shrunken and white-haired, ravaged by a wasting disease. Florence has…
Molly Bolt is a force of nature from her very first breath. Born illegitimate in a coffee can in Shiloh, Pennsylvania, adopted by Carl and Carrie Bolt, and raised in the rural South, she enters the world already marked as an outsider. Rather than shrinking from this designation, she claims it,…
Carrie Bolt is the adoptive mother who shapes Molly's world from the very beginning, and the contradictions within her character form one of the most emotionally resonant threads in the narrative. She is domineering, bigoted, sharp-tongued, and possessed of politics "to the right of Genghis Khan,"…
Leroy is Molly's childhood companion and the closest thing she has to a sibling during her years in the hollow and later in Fort Lauderdale. Their relationship is one of genuine affection and mutual loyalty, but it is also shaped by the racial dynamics of the American South and by the divergent…
Connie Pen enters Molly's life during high school and quickly becomes one third of the "gleesome threesome" alongside Carolyn Simpson. She is intelligent, sharp-witted, and shares Molly's irreverent view of the world. Together they devise pranks, manipulate classmates, and treat the social…
By Rita Mae Brown
Subject
Themes
Molly Bolt is born illegitimate and adopted by Carl and Carrie Bolt, a working-class couple in Coffee Hollow, Pennsylvania. From her earliest years, she demonstrates a precocious intelligence and an absolute refusal to conform. She runs childhood scams, punches bullies, and locks her adoptive mother in the root cellar when Carrie tries to confine her to domestic lessons. Carrie wields Molly's adoption as a weapon during arguments, calling her a bastard, but Carl quietly champions her, insisting she will go to college and make something of herself.