Lust

Lust is both a private experience and a public argument in the novel: it shapes T. S. Garp’s relationships, strains his conversations with Jenny Fields, and becomes a central subject in Jenny’s autobiography. Their disagreement is not simply over Garp’s behavior. Jenny treats desire as a force that compromises women’s independence, while Garp objects when her account makes his own sexual history into a widely read case study.

Early Experience and Private Desire

As a young man, Garp is involved with Cushie Percy. Their intimacy occurs near the cannons at Steering, where a local sexual catchphrase has made the site a joking emblem of youthful encounters. The setting places desire alongside the novel’s comic treatment of adolescent life, but Cushie’s words make clear that attraction does not mean she wants a child: she tells Garp she does not want babies, including his, and refers to his possible Japanese ancestry. She then promises that the encounter will give him something to write about. Lust is thus linked early to both sexual experience and the material Garp may turn into fiction.

The same episode also distinguishes desire from affection without making them unrelated. Later, when Jenny asks whether Garp feels lust for Helen Holm as well as for Cushie, Garp admits that he does. Jenny cannot understand how he can associate the feeling with pleasure or affection. Her questions expose a gap between their accounts of intimacy: Garp recognizes desire as part of his experience, while Jenny approaches it as something alien and troubling.

A Disagreement Between Mother and Son

During their stay in Vienna, Garp discusses lust with Jenny and gives her a restrained account of his encounter with Cushie. The subject changes the mood of their evening. When Jenny wants to ask a group of women about lust, Garp is impatient to go home; their conversation has moved from his personal confession to a question Jenny wants to pursue beyond the family.

On the way home, Garp explains Vienna’s system of prostitution. Jenny responds by defending a woman’s right to use her body as she chooses and asks about the price of sex. Garp’s familiarity with the prices prompts her to slap him and accuse him of knowing too much. She apologizes for striking him, but says she cannot understand the recurring force of lust. The exchange sharpens the difference between her abstract defense of women’s autonomy and her personal disgust at sexual desire as Garp describes it.

Jenny’s Autobiography and Its Public Argument

The conversation in Vienna becomes a turning point in Jenny’s writing. When spring arrives, she has found the sentence that had been taking shape since her discussions of lust with Garp and Charlotte. She makes it the opening principle of her autobiography, A Sexual Suspect: “In this dirty-minded world, you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.” The sentence gives the book a unifying idea, binding together otherwise discordant parts of her life. Jenny follows it with the account that wanting a job and wanting to live alone made her a sexual suspect; the same argument supplies the book’s title.

Jenny’s view of desire also appears in her conversation with Ernie Holm, when she declares that the world is sick with lust and warns that it gets everyone in the end. In the published book, she writes that “Lust makes the best of men behave out of character.” These formulations extend the subject beyond Garp’s personal history: Jenny makes lust a general explanation for the vulnerability of women and the conduct of men. Her claims become part of the book’s public identity, which reviewers praise as a feminist defense of a woman’s life without sexual attachment. Jenny herself is uneasy with the label feminism, explaining that she had intended to defend the life she chose rather than to claim a formal political identity.

Garp’s Resistance and the Concept’s Role

For Garp, the “lust” chapter is especially embarrassing. He can accept being known as a famous child born out of wedlock, but resents becoming a public case history of adolescent desire. Helen finds the chapter funny, though she does not understand his attraction to prostitutes. Garp, by contrast, is furious at Jenny’s confident interpretation. He argues that she has never experienced lust and therefore lacks authority to describe its motives, comparing her account to a plant describing a mammal’s behavior.

The conflict gives lust two opposed meanings without resolving them. In Garp’s experience, it is a feeling that can coexist with pleasure and affection; in Jenny’s writing, it is a force that places women under sexual judgment and can make men act against their better character. The repeated discussion carries the private disagreement into Jenny’s autobiography, where Garp’s intimate life becomes evidence in an argument he rejects. Lust therefore connects desire, embarrassment, sexual autonomy, and the power to narrate another person’s experience.