Chapter 8: Quizzer Linda Lee

1. What does it mean by "You get to be what's expected of you"(276)?

Norah Vincent, in this last chapter, confessed frankly that she didn't feel quite fitted in the role of man. The feeling of constantly being scrutinized and evaluated by people around and the world in general weren't allowing Vincent to feel "free at all". Every human being tends to take a role that is expected of him/her and act on it every day but Men as Ned viewed were easily sympathized because they weren't able to express their emotional defects and hurting inside at a same time. Nevertheless, I think Vincent especially felt so because she was acting Ned as what he was expected of. Vincent couldn't be free because she had to not go off limits of manhood that is known naturally.

2. What was it that made Ned seem so real to Vincent and other people who were involved with Ned?

Ned was not found out by people around him. Vincent was a "real" man for at least a year. She was physically and spiritually the "real" man. Vincent successfully accomplished her mission as a disguised man for a year and the main key reason to Ned's success as Vincent regards was his powerful psychological that Vincent had worked on Ned. It was Vincent's mental projection of Ned that became so natural and "undetectable" even to Vincent herself. Vincent had deceived everyone perfectly and made them believe as what they saw in Ned. Self-discipline and mind-set did function well in both Ned and Vincent.

3. What about "manhood" Vincent wanted to experience and prove to the world and to herself but failed to do so?

As Vincent wrote a few times throughout the book, she used to be a very tomboyish girl with three older brothers who have added the "manliness" in Vincent. Vincent wrote that she'd always envied about boyhood when she was a child: "the perceived freedoms of being unafraid in the world, stamping around loudly with legs apart."At the beginning of the project Vincent thought living as a man and having access to a man's world would be like gaining admission to the big and open and the real deal life. That was what Vincent presumed she would experience as Ned but the outcome was polar opposite. She felt nothing more than wooden, terse, dissimulated and hardened. I don't think Vincent failed but found out the truth about her ideal world by failing to prove what she thought was totally misjudged.

4. What does this one year of disguised man Ned mean to Norah Vincent and the readers?

No matter how much she hated herself for choosing to be Ned for a year, it was certainly a different way to view the world. Vincent in particular who had admired "manhood" before, it definitely provided her with more than enough experience and information to see the misjudgement about them. Vincent referred men to whom are in pain. "A lot of them are in pain" isn't just a statement. Vincent experienced the same pain as Ned and it's more convincing than a random person says, "I know how you feel about your pain." Vincent truly lived as one in every aspect of one's life. There were restrictions and obstacles that makes her tasks impossible but changing a gender and live as a wholly different person is a big deal and I, as a reader, admire Vincent for her powerful endurance, passion and commitment to her work.