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Analysis Of Black And Blue By Anna Quindlen

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Intimate partner violence is characterized not only by physical violence, but also sexual, emotional, and mental violence through the use of threats (Understanding Intimate Partner Violence, 2011). In Black and Blue, Anna Quindlen delves into the mind of a woman who faces intimate partner violence in her everyday life. Fran, or Beth, and her son attempt to get away from Fran’s abusive cop husband. While Black and Blue is a fiction novel, its points about intimate partner violence hold true in many cases such as the breaking of traditional gender roles, high levels of stress, alcohol overconsumption, and learned behavior.
Traditional Gender Roles This seemed to be a reoccurring theme throughout Black and Blue. Since Fran was a nurse in a hospital and made more money than her husband, a police officer, she felt as if he hit her a few times because she could possibly be seen as more successful than him. “‘Hey, Frances Ann,’ he said, doing our taxes… ‘you make more money than I do.’ And a shiver went through me. I could read his voice as well as I could read an X ray” (Quindlen, p 68). Fran knew that Bobby felt emasculated because she made more money than him, which made her afraid he was going to hit her. Research shows that the more educated a woman is, the more liberal her thinking is. If her partner is conservative thinking about the social status of women are more likely to abuse someone with a liberal thinking, like Fran has in the novel (Jewkes, 2002). Men who

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