New Hampshire

New Hampshire is the setting for a gubernatorial contest in which political rhetoric turns feminism and women’s autonomy into objects of public alarm. The incumbent governor’s campaign presents the state as threatened by outsiders and social change, while Jenny Fields and Roberta Muldoon work for a woman challenging him. The campaign’s local tensions culminate at a shopping-plaza rally near Dog’s Head Harbor, where Jenny is shot as her son watches from Vienna.

Political Climate

Jenny tells Garp that she has become involved in New Hampshire politics, and Roberta writes that the gubernatorial race is consuming all their time. Garp’s skeptical reply—“How could anyone give all her time to a New Hampshire governor?”—sets his distance from a campaign that Jenny and Roberta treat as urgent. Their involvement reflects the stakes: the incumbent’s administration boasts that it denied an abortion to a raped fourteen-year-old, describing the decision as a victory against national degeneracy.

The governor also opposes state and federal aid to poor people, presenting poverty as a deserved punishment imposed by a “Superior Being.” His politics join punitive moral judgment to calculated fearmongering. He warns that divorced women from New York are moving into New Hampshire in droves and depicts them as threats to local marriages, husbands, and high-school boys. The press gives this supposed social danger the ominous label “Group Female Living,” associating the women with promiscuity, socialism, alimony, and lesbianism.

Campaign and Public Conflict

Dog’s Head Harbor becomes a focus of the governor’s attacks: it is named as a center of the alleged “Group Female Living” and denounced as “the den of the radical feminist Jenny Fields.” The campaign’s rhetoric also invokes a supposed rise in venereal disease, blaming “these Liberationists.” Against this well-liked incumbent, a woman runs for governor; Jenny, Roberta, and what Jenny calls “teams of New York divorcees” work on her campaign.

The conflict reaches the television audience through a rally in a shopping-plaza parking lot a few miles from Dog’s Head Harbor. Garp recognizes the New Hampshire landscape as he watches from Vienna. The challenger appears educated, idealistic, and kind, yet barely restrains her anger at the values represented by the incumbent. Pickup trucks circle the lot, carrying men in hunting coats and caps who appear to represent local interests set against the New York divorcees. The scene makes the campaign’s abstractions physically visible: competing claims to belong in New Hampshire are staged in a parking lot ringed by trucks.

Jenny’s Assassination and the Broadcast

From Vienna, Garp watches the New Hampshire rally unfold on his landlady’s television. Earlier, he, Helen, Duncan, and baby Jenny had sat in the pension waiting for the news; their bewildered landlady served coffee and little cakes, but only Duncan ate. The distance between the family and the campaign is measured in delayed news: the newspapers would take a day to reach Austria, while television brought the event into the room as it happened.

Jenny speaks from the back of a pickup truck. Roberta lifts her onto the tailgate and adjusts the microphone; beside Roberta, Jenny looks very small, though her white uniform stands out brightly. She identifies herself to the assembled crowd, amid cheers, whistles, hoots, and the horns of trucks circling the lot. Police order the trucks to move; they leave and return. As the horns and crowd noise continue, a single gunshot cuts through the broadcast. No one sees where it came from.

Roberta catches Jenny under the arms. A small dark splash marks the white uniform. She carries Jenny down from the truck and through the breaking crowd, moving with the force and decisiveness of a football player driving through a defensive line. A police car approaches to intercept her; Roberta presents Jenny’s body to the officers, and Garp sees his mother’s unmoving figure lifted above the crowd into a policeman’s arms. The car speeds away as the television camera turns to an apparent shoot-out among the circling trucks and several police cars. The broadcast later shows a man in a hunting coat lying in a dark puddle and identifies a close-up object only as a deer rifle; the report notes that deer season has not officially opened.

The news arrives as spectacle, with the rally, the shooting, the police response, and the apparent gunfight assembled into what the narration calls an X-rated soap opera, despite the absence of nudity. Garp thanks the landlady for letting them watch. Within two hours, the family is in Frankfurt, changing planes for New York. Even the Under Toad, usually a figure for Garp’s anxiety, seems absent from the flight for a while; the immediate terror has shifted elsewhere.

A Local Campaign Made Visible

New Hampshire’s campaign becomes a spectacle of competing claims to the state. The incumbent governor’s warnings turn outsiders into a threat to local marriages and morals; at the shopping-plaza rally, that rhetoric acquires a visible constituency in the pickup trucks circling the parking lot. The men in hunting coats and caps are described as representing local New Hampshire interests, set against the interest in the state taken by the New York divorcees. The contrast is not simply between two campaign teams: it stages a contest over who belongs and whose presence can be made to signify danger.

The woman challenging the incumbent appears educated, idealistic, and kind, while barely restraining her anger at the values he represents. That contrast gives the confrontation a human scale without making it seem calm or orderly. The trucks repeatedly move away when police tell them to, then return, and their horns punctuate Jenny’s brief address. The campaign that had circulated through political claims and newspaper labels has become a crowded, noisy struggle over public space.

For Garp, the broadcast makes New Hampshire at once familiar and far away. The shopping plaza’s vaguely seacoast landscape lets him recognize a place only a few miles from Dog’s Head Harbor, although he is watching from Vienna. The televised image thus joins the threatened home landscape to the family’s temporary distance from it: the scene is close enough to recognize, but the news reaches them through a screen, with the force of an unfolding public spectacle.

Political Rhetoric and the Limits of the Broadcast

The political conflict in New Hampshire is built from competing descriptions of who threatens the state. The incumbent’s rhetoric turns divorced women from New York into agents of sexual disorder and political change, while casting aid to poor people as undeserved and an abortion denied to a raped fourteen-year-old as a victory over degeneracy. These claims make private lives and social vulnerability into campaign weapons. The label “Group Female Living” gives the alleged threat a public name, and the attack on Dog’s Head Harbor as “the den of the radical feminist Jenny Fields” ties the governor’s alarm directly to Jenny’s home and reputation.

At the rally, the televised scene seems to confirm a contest over public space without clarifying who has made the violence happen. The trucks circle, obey police orders to move, and return; the gunshot comes from an unseen source. The camera then turns toward an apparent shoot-out, showing a dead man in a hunting coat and, later, a deer rifle, while the report notes that deer season has not officially opened. The broadcast supplies sharp images but not a settled account of responsibility. Its sequence of political speech, shooting, police intervention, and gunfire becomes a spectacle that Garp’s family can watch but cannot control or fully interpret.

That distance is part of the scene’s force. Garp recognizes the shopping plaza as being only a few miles from Dog’s Head Harbor, yet he watches from Vienna, where newspapers would arrive a day late and television brings the assassination into the pension immediately. The familiar New Hampshire landscape reaches him as an image on a screen, while Jenny’s body is carried away and the camera shifts to the surrounding disorder. After the broadcast, the family leaves for Frankfurt and changes planes for New York. For a while, even the Under Toad seems elsewhere: not a resolution of danger, but a brief displacement of the fear that has crossed the ocean with the news.