How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
That was why she was ashamed. He was the one who smelled […] Treating her like another animal and both of them must have looked just like it in that room. One dog sniffing at the hindquarters of another, and the female, her back to him, not moving. (4.345)
After Son grabs her and smells her hair, Jade feels ashamed. She thinks that smell is something that is attached to animals, not civilized people like herself. But when Son reminds her that she has a smell just like everything else, she feels for a second that she might still be nothing more than a female animal.
Quote #2
The face in the peaches compelled him to dismiss Margaret's screaming entrance as the tantrum of a spoiled child, the deliberate creation of a scene, which both father and son understood as feminine dementia. (5.63)
Whenever Margaret gets upset about something, Valerian tends to blame it on the fact that she's a woman. In fact, Valerian uses gender a lot in order to avoid having to take women's opinions seriously.
Quote #3
It was easy not to believe in Margaret's hysteria; he had seen examples of it many times before and thought she was up to her old combo of masochism plus narcissism that he believed common to exceptionally beautiful women. (5.64)
Again, Valerian will think whatever he has to in order to avoid taking his wife seriously. His most common way of neglecting her is to blame all of her outbursts of negative emotions on the fact that she's an irrational woman. More specifically, Valerian thinks that women who have spent their lives being pretty are even more prone to being drama queens because they're used to getting what they want.
Quote #4
[They] did not wish to see the crying, crying girls split in two parts by their tight jeans, screaming at the top of their high, high heels, straining against the pull of their braids and the fluorescent combs holding their hair. (7.1)
When Son first gets to New York, the first thing he notices is the prostitutes standing on the street corners. He finds it hard to look at these women because many of them are black and are selling their bodies to white men. If it's a tough life for black men, it's doubly tough for black women.
Quote #5
They stood around the room, jostling each other gently, gently—there wasn't much room—revealing one breast and then two and Jadine was shocked." (9.185)
Jade is shocked to find herself visited by visions of black women when she's staying in Son's hometown of Eloe, Florida. She's even more shocked when these women start pulling out their breasts in front of her. The breasts in this case symbolize the way that these women want Jade to give into her traditional gender role and become a mother. But this isn't what Jade wants out of life.
Quote #6
That twenty-five-year-old face looked twenty-six and she had not been keeping up the regimen that held her at the twenty-year-old mark. (9.283)
As someone who works as a model, Jade has to maintain a very strict beauty regimen in order to keep herself looking twenty years old. When this regimen starts to wane, though, she starts losing gigs. After all, modeling agencies like for women to look very young. Men, on the other hand, can always get away with looking a little older.
Quote #7
He tried to imagine what kind of woman she would be in fifty years. Would she be Thérèse? Or Ondine? Or Rosa or Sally Brown, or maybe even Francine, frail as a pick tearing all her hair out in the hospital. (9.284)
When Son looks at Jade, he wonders what kind of woman she'll eventually turn into. The one thing he never imagines, though, is that Jade will turn out to be a very successful, totally self-sustaining person. The idea of a woman living life for herself and no one else seems to be completely outside Son's world of possibility.
Quote #8
She thought she was rescuing him from the night women who […] wanted her to settle for wifely competence when she could be almighty, to settle for fertility rather than originality, nurturing instead of building. (9.287)
Jade wants to travel the world and do amazing things with her life. But she realizes that the women from Son's hometown just want her to settle down and be a wife and mother. Jade will never be able to consent to this because she would see it as giving up. Nonetheless, she can't help but feel judged by the women who have led this kind of life.
Quote #9
[If a girl] never learns to be a daughter, she can't never learn how to be a woman. I mean a real woman: a woman good enough for a child; good enough for a man—good enough even for the respect of other women. (10.84)
For Jade's aunt Ondine, a girl can never learn to be a proper woman unless she understands and accepts her duty toward her family. If a girl never learns this, she'll never make a good mother, because at some point, every woman needs to learn how to live her life for someone else. For Ondine, this is required if a woman ever plans on being respected by other women.
Quote #10
I don't want to learn how to be the kind of woman you're talking about because I don't want to be that kind of woman. (10.89)
In response to Ondine's ideas about being a woman, Jade claims that she never wants to live her life for someone else. She doesn't want to be a servant like Ondine. She wants to live her life for herself and wants to pursue the things that she cares about. It might sound selfish, but that's how she feels.