“Doing a Grillparzer”

“Doing a Grillparzer” names Jenny Fields’s tendency to bring a scene or character into her writing with the suddenness of an alarm. The expression begins as a practical diagnosis of a jarring narrative entrance, then becomes a way to understand how Jenny gives shape and force to the episodes of her life. Its changing use also marks the difference between her own craft vocabulary and the public label attached to the choices her autobiography inspired.

Jenny’s Meaning of the Expression

Jenny explains the phrase while discussing her writing with Garp. By “doing a Grillparzer,” she means introducing a scene or character “like an alarm going off.” She identifies the movie-house encounter in Boston, when a soldier approached her, as the scene she has in mind. In the sentence she had written about it, the soldier is described as “consumed with lust.”

Garp calls the wording awful, and Jenny insists that it accurately names what she understood had happened: “But that’s what it was,” Jenny said. “It was lust, all right.” Garp offers an alternative—“thick with lust”—but the exchange does not establish that Jenny adopts his revision. Instead, it shows the phrase at work as a shared discussion of how a sentence can make an entrance feel forceful, and how a writer’s choice of words shapes the effect of a scene.

From Abrupt Entrance to Autobiographical Form

The expression is connected to a larger problem in Jenny’s book: how to make a life story whose parts do not naturally fit together feel coherent. While in Vienna, she finds a sentence that has been taking shape since the earlier conversation about lust. It becomes the opening that gives her autobiography a tone it had lacked and, in the narrator’s account, binds the disharmonious parts of her story together.

The sentence begins, “In this dirty-minded world,” and sets out Jenny’s sense that a woman is categorized as someone’s wife or someone’s whore, or judged to be approaching one of those positions. The book develops this claim through other statements about the choices that made Jenny suspect in the eyes of others. She writes that wanting a job and wanting to live alone made her a sexual suspect; wanting a child without sharing her body or life did so as well. These are not interchangeable episodes: together they turn the phrase from an observation about one abrupt scene into a method for connecting distinct experiences of independence, work, and motherhood.

That method gives the autobiography both a title and a binding principle. Jenny calls the book A Sexual Suspect. The account describes her recurring sentences as a bright thread woven through an otherwise sprawling tapestry, an image that makes the relation between her writing choices and the book’s structure explicit. “Doing a Grillparzer” thus points not only to the jolt of an entrance but also to the larger work of making separate parts of a life answer to a common perspective.

Public Reception and “Doing a Jenny Fields”

The expression acquires a second life after Jenny’s book is published. Some reviewers criticize her writing, while other responses welcome the autobiography as a feminist account of a woman living a whole life without a sexual attachment. John Wolf warns Jenny that she may be received either as the right voice at the right time or dismissed as entirely wrong; her book is, in fact, taken up as a timely voice, though she feels uneasy with the word feminism and does not fully understand how political the book will become.

The distinction matters to Jenny. She describes herself as someone who chose how to live and spoke in defense of that choice when it was unpopular. For her, the central point is that women, like men, should be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives. Her later account of nursing likewise stresses practical care for people who cannot help themselves, a spirit she says also informed her wish to write.

The book’s reception extends beyond reviews. A group of young women at Florida State University in Tallahassee generates controversy by planning pregnancies, and this kind of choice becomes known in New York as “doing a Jenny Fields.” Garp, however, continues to call it “doing a Grillparzer.” The two expressions frame the same cultural response differently: the public label attaches the women’s actions to Jenny, while Garp’s preferred phrase preserves the older association with a sudden, striking entrance in writing. The shift from a writer’s private term to a phrase used for choices made by other women captures the book’s movement from personal account to public example.

Significance

The expression links literary technique to the social force of Jenny’s autobiography. At first, it describes how a scene can arrive with the force of an alarm; later, Jenny’s opening sentence gives her book an organizing voice capable of connecting experiences that had seemed disharmonious. The phrase therefore holds together two scales of effect: the immediate impact of a sentence and the cumulative structure of a life story.

Its changing use also preserves a tension between Jenny’s account of her intentions and the meanings others assign to it. Jenny says she wanted to defend choices about how to live, not that she set out to become a political symbol. Yet reviewers, readers, and women who adopt related choices turn the book into something larger than a personal narrative. “Doing a Grillparzer” remains Garp’s name for the abrupt literary gesture, even as “doing a Jenny Fields” names the public consequences of Jenny’s example.