(HUMANISM) Cry Shame! by Gore Vidal

THEORY

HUMANISM

-The focus of the humanist theory is MAN.

-It "requires" that the piece present man as essentially rational; that is endowed with intellect and free will.

TITLE | AUTHOR

CRY SHAME!  BY GORE VIDAL

SYNOPSIS

Cry Shame! is the story of Graziella Serrano, the ambitious daughter of Mexico’s greatest lion tamer.

This is how young Graziella’s first sexual experience – when she is 14 pretending to be 18 – is described: She was often surprised, when she thought of it, how little this experience with George Wilson had meant to her. Always before, when she’d dreamed of such an act, she had associated all sorts of romantic things with it, or, if not romantic things, at least shocking ones, in which she felt that her entire life would be changed, everything would show in her face and she would be — if not transformed and uplifted — degraded. 

Graziella is ambitious, and she wants to be a star. In a Monterrey bar the 14 year old dances without her parent’s permission – it’s not stripping, though, but flamenco. Here she learns to drink hard and play fast. And here she meets a rich older man, Jason Carter, whom she eventually marries, but only when her brother finds out about her moonlighting and she decides to flee Monterrey. 

Cut to: 4 years later, Graziella is now 18. It’s the 1930s, but in a Hollywood that the Depression does not touch, and she has been studying ballet for 4 years. Carter knows the truth about her age by this time, although like everyone else he thought she was 18 when she was 14. 

On this auspicious day Graziella meets her first homosexuals on the beach, and with them her first Hollywood mogul. She charms, flirts, and ends up being cast in a film. Graziella is then transformed into Grace Carter, a woman who, in the style of her creator, has a tendency to dream about a blond, blue-eyed dream man who would one day be her true love. 

When Grace meets her blond, the actor Eric Davis, she is a little too haughty and self-possessed to realise that this could turn into Love. Eric Davis was a medium-sized young man with short blond curly hair, vivid blue eyes and features which, in life, were nondescript but which, on the screen, became oddly sensual for one so fair. His body looked well-developed under the correct, impeccable tuxedo he wore. His face was only slightly made up and his hair was carefully disarranged. He looked very boyish and windblown; he grinned at her when they were introduced. At first she thinks he is a stupid, but eventually she falls madly in love. 

Grace invites Eric to Reno, where she is in the process of divorcing the kindly plot-device-disguised-as-character Jason Carter. Eric mounts her awkwardly. “It was accomplished with such violence that she was almost sick in her ecstasy. She had never known anything like this. She had never known there could be such violence in the world.” How very Barbara Cartland-esque. Eric then admits it’s his first time with a woman. But not his first time. Grace is confused. “I’ve played the field an awful lot. But this is my first time at this sort of thing,” Eric explains. The penny drops. “She was stunned. She had had no inkling about this. She had no idea he was like so many of the others. He seemed so ordinary and so masculine, so very much the typical American boy: she found it impossible to believe.” Plus it turns out he does have a “well-developed” body hiding under his clothes. The shame! When she does not get what she wants, Grace spirals downward, and this leads to … well, it would spoil the book to say exactly what it led to :P

ANALYSIS

The whole story focuses on the life of an ambitious Latina girl. Her passion for dancing brought her to the light of stardom.She met many people along the way, who teach her life lessons.

The fact that the story focuses on human nature is enough reason to classify this as an example of Humanism.

It's actually hard to find information about the novel but it's worth the time once you get to know what the whole story is all about.