“His thing that summer was crickets, I don’t know why. […] If he was successful, he’d put it in one of those little jars – jars that once held gourmet items like tapenade and aioli. I’d never heard of these things before, but with Gideon, I’d find myself eating tapenade on fancy stale bread one night, and the next night we’d rinse out the jar and voilà, a cricket would be living in it.”
“Gideon” by ZZ Packer is a short, first person narrative about a nineteen-year-old Black woman who is living with her PhD candidate Jewish boyfriend. Throughout the piece the speaker narrates how she had never felt right in the relationship and she outlines the many instances in which Gideon had been patronizing, pedantic, and otherwise obnoxious. However, beneath the surface the speaker seems to be actually reflecting upon some themes of power within relationships specifically as it pertains to gender, race, and education. Packer creates a dichotomy by placing Gideon; the white, male, post-graduate scholar in the position of power; and, the speaker, a black woman with no higher education, as the subordinate. Packer achieves the undercurrent dialogue by using metaphors such as one regarding crickets in jars.
Packer seems to set the crickets up as a representative for the speaker, by that I mean, an object that the reader can use to illustrate the speaker’s position in relation to Gideon. Packer establishes that connection for the reader in the third paragraph where she writes, “‘And you,’ he said, unscrewing a cricket jar, looking at the cricket but speaking to me, ‘you think the neo-industrial complex doesn’t pertain to you, but it does, because by tacitly participating blah blah blah you’re engaging in blah blah commodification of workers blah blah blah allowing the neo-Reaganites to blah blah blah but you can’t escape the dialectic.’” By saying “…looking at the cricket but talking to me,” Packer plants the idea in the reader that Gideon treats the speaker in a manner that is similar to the cricket and thereby puts them into a similar caste.
Packer continues the metaphor in the next paragraph, which is the one I have excerpted at the beginning of my analysis. The opening comment, “His thing this summer was crickets, I don’t know why.” brings the reader back to the speaker’s comment in the first paragraph, “He was one of those white guys who had a thing for black women.” Both these statements imply a sort of quirk, in that the speaker provides these comments as though they were explanations, which in the context of the entire piece make it seem as though collecting crickets and dating black women are equally odd actions and it is important to clarify for the audience how he came to be involved with such practices. The “I don’t know why” is also important in establishing the connection between the crickets as a symbol for the speaker because it explains her need to explain Gideon’s actions and reflect upon why she feels insecure in the relationship. She doesn’t understand his obsession with the crickets similar to the way she doesn’t understand why he is with her because he doesn’t treat either of them with much adoration. Furthermore, Packer’s choice to refer to both actions as “[Gideon’s] thing” connects them in a way where both actions become casual and implies them to be phases. Thereby, allowing the speaker to use the crickets as a point of comparison for her place in her relationship with Gideon, because they are both just experiments in his life, just a new something that he finds interesting.
Continuing with the same paragraph, the speaker describes, “Sometimes he would go out barefoot with a flashlight and try to catch a cricket. If he was successful, he’d put it in one of those little jars.” Describing Gideon’s process for catching the cricket is also important in reinforcing the cricket as a symbol for Gideon’s treatment and opinion regarding the speaker. His process for catching the crickets is similar to how the speaker describes he approached her, “He was one of those white guys who had a thing for black women, but he’d apparently been too afraid to ask anyone out until me.” If we continue with the previously made connection that both the cricket and the speaker are experiments, then it makes sense that Packer would use the same nuance in describing the cricket process and the courtship. The formulation Packer used describe Gideon’s strategy was she established a very large general group (i.e. cricket/black women) and then honed in on any cricket he could put in a jar, or on the marginalized speaker at the Pita Delicious. The nuance further affirms that, for Gideon, the relationship is nothing more than a way of him establishing a power structure in which he is on top. If he really had a thing for Black women, as a PhD candidate he would have most likely had the opportunity to meet many Black women at the top their fields; however realizing that he probably gives himself more credit than he deserves he realized he would need a leg-up, a flashlight if you will, to catch any woman who would let him control her, so he targeted the young naïve pita clerk who would (at least for a little while) be impressed by his pseudo-philosophy, and he attempted trapped her.
The connection between the speaker and the crickets in regard to entrapment is the final layer to uncover in Packer’s metaphor. Directly within the main paragraph we have been discussing Packer writes, “If he was successful, he’d put it in one of those little jars – jars that once held gourmet items like tapenade and aioli. I’d never heard of these things before, but with Gideon, I’d find myself eating tapenade on fancy stale bread one night, and the next night we’d rinse out the jar and voilà, a cricket would be living in it.” The speaker’s description, which outlines the way in which the jars she eats the gourmet food from, which were introduced and provided to her by Gideon, eventually become the tomb for the crickets. In that quote, Packer finalizes the metaphor that, to Gideon, the speaker is just like the cricket. In taking the cricket from the outside and placing it indoors in a jar Gideon tears it away from its natural habitat and forces it to become dependent upon him for survival. In a similar fashion Gideon has introduced the speaker into all sorts of fancy things and scholarly ideas thereby throwing her totally out of her element gravely limiting her personal choices for happiness. However, where the cricket experiment only resulted in callused feet for Gideon and uncomfortable sex for the speaker, the speaker experiment seemed like it would only end badly for both of them.
There was probably no chance Gideon would collect live crickets for the rest of his life so, in the worst-case scenario the crickets trapped in tapenade jars would die and in the best-case scenario be released. If we compare the possible outcomes in the speaker experiment, she sees nearly the same outcomes that were offered in the cricket scenario. Best-case scenario, they’re together forever and he resents her for forcing him to give up everything; worst-case scenario, she ends up trapped, stagnant, and dependent until he eventually tosses her aside because there is no way he would opt to keep the pita girl forever. As strong as Packer’s cricket metaphor is the speaker isn’t a cricket so in the end she realizes that it isn’t Gideon’s choice whether she go to school, or eat tapenade, or live in a house with nice wood details so she chooses to leave him and pursue her own choices, because he never really showed her that she had any besides the Pita Delicious (the backyard) or the house (the jar).
