Garp publicly denounces the Ellen Jamesians

Garp’s public polemic against the Ellen Jamesians begins as an attempt to defend Ellen James, but becomes an argument over who has the right to speak for her. After a magazine publishes her criticism of the movement, its members portray her as manipulated by Garp; his angry reply gives them more publicity and leaves him isolated even from Ellen, whose own account of the underlying harm complicates his insistence that they started the fight.

The magazine controversy

As the season approached its final dual meet, Garp sat at the kitchen table estimating the likely wins and losses for the Steering wrestling team’s match against Bath. Ellen arrived in tears with a new issue of the magazine that had published her a month earlier. The publication had followed her announcement that she felt used by the Ellen Jamesians and disliked them with a long, epistolary essay by a group of the movement’s members. The editor had also revealed that Ellen lived with the notorious T. S. Garp, information that made her private circumstances part of the controversy.

The letters cast Ellen as a child brainwashed into an antifeminist position by Garp, whom they described as a male villain and as a betrayer of his mother and a political opportunist. They called his relationship with Ellen “seductive,” “slimy,” and “underhanded.” Ellen wrote an apology and said she wished she could speak. Crying on Garp’s shoulder, she drew the household’s attention: Helen came from the reading room, Duncan left the darkroom, and baby Jenny woke from her nap. Her distress makes the dispute more than a public exchange of positions: the magazine’s debate about what Ellen represents has reached the person whose experience it claims to interpret.

Garp’s published response

Garp decided to answer the Ellen Jamesians, despite Helen’s plea that he not be baited and Ellen’s explicit assurance that the fight was hers. He opened his essay with the declaration, “Ellen James is not a symbol,” identifying her instead as a rape victim who had been harmed before she was old enough to form her own views about sex and men. From there he wrote at length against the movement’s claim to speak for her.

The essay condemned the damage the Ellen Jamesians inflicted on themselves in protest and argued that their actions gave feminism a bad name. Garp expressed himself angrily but eloquently, and the magazine published the response, drawn—as it had been by the earlier letters—to controversy. The piece was the first published work under T. S. Garp’s name since the novel The World According to Bensenhaver, though it was not in fact his first writing after that book. Shortly after Jenny’s death, he had published a poem about condoms in a little magazine; its subject repelled most readers, while the dispute over Ellen attracted much wider attention. Garp recognized the difference between news and art, even as his return to publication came through the former.

Ellen and Helen challenge his intervention

Helen warned Garp that his response was not truly for Ellen. In her view, he had taken up the cause because he wanted to get at the Ellen Jamesians, and his essay gave a fading movement fresh attention. Ellen, too, had told him that she had not asked him to support her. His choice to speak therefore sits uneasily beside the essay’s central insistence that Ellen is a person rather than a symbol: in defending her, Garp risks treating his own anger as the decisive voice in her dispute.

Garp remained sullen, convinced that the Ellen Jamesians had started the conflict. The argument left him estranged even from Ellen, who was ready to end the matter and regretted having initiated it. When he insisted, “But they started it,” she traced the wrong back further—to the first man who raped a woman and tried to prevent her from telling anyone. Her answer shifts the frame from the movement’s provocative tactics to the original violence and silencing that gave rise to Ellen’s experience. Garp answered, “Okay,” acknowledging a truth that hurt him: his wish to defend her did not settle the question of whose fight it was.

Publicity, art, and consequence

The polemic’s immediate effect is double-edged. It states more firmly what Ellen had meant and challenges the movement’s claim to represent her, but it also supplies the Ellen Jamesians with another public controversy and focuses attention on Garp’s role. The accusation that he was using women’s-movement politics and Helen’s criticism that he had done the dispute for his opponents make the defense itself part of the problem under examination.

The episode also marks a limited return to writing for a man regarded as a retired writer. His essay reached a larger readership than his poem, not because it was art but because it addressed a current controversy. Yet publication does not resolve the disagreement: Ellen is ready to leave it behind, while Garp remains caught in the certainty that someone must answer the provocation. His eventual concession registers the cost of that certainty without erasing his protective intent. The episode thus distinguishes defending a person from claiming authority over her story, and shows how public argument can turn a private injury into a spectacle even when the response is meant to oppose that transformation.