Myra Breckinridge Summary
Gore Vidal

Myra Breckinridge Summary

M yra Breckinridge marked Vidal's return to the public eye at the center of a major controversy. This novel, delineating some fantastic consequences of a sex change operation, scandalized some readers, but it allowed Vidal to paint a strongly satirical portrait of American society. Myra Breckinridge shows, on the one hand, that the ideals of the American way of life are identical to those of the B movies of the 1940s and 1950s and, on the other, that all power is in some ultimate sense sexual power. The novel seeks to make readers rethink all sexual stereotypes. Just when the crazed feminist has shown the ultimate absurdity of the new theory of woman, the reader discovers that Myra is, after all, a transsexual (fiction's first transsexual heroine) and thus in her very nature a parody of womanhood, yet the satire does not stop here...

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