Ginger's Role in Patty-Jo & Ginger

The reading on Patty-Jo & Ginger described Ginger very succinctly: "attractive but silent." In class, we discussed why Ginger is a part of the cartoons at all, given that she is voiceless in a medium that, by all accounts, requires outspokenness. Ginger is posed like a pinup, dressed at the height of fashion, and seems to be little more than a figure of security, a token 'adult presence' that the audacious Patty-Jo drags in tow. One could read her as being the ideal foil for her younger sister: prim, well-dressed, bourgeois, silent. But I think her role in the comic goes beyond this kind of tokenism.

First of all, Ginger is not entirely a silent character. While she doesn't say a word within the single-panel comic, several of the cartoons depict Patty-Jo reacting to something her sister must have said. The single panel captures one moment in time, as broadly and deeply as necessary, but it cannot go beyond that. So Ginger can speak and has already spoken. We have to read the cartoon first and then retroactively infer what it is that Ginger said or did. In a way, the audience has to fill in Ginger's part in the comic; we have to be the voice of authority or ask the question that Patty-Jo responds to. But it is telling that this moment has already passed to make way for Patty-Jo's voice, which dominates the panel. Perhaps it is a stylistic choice to let the voice of the 'adults' fade into the background and become something that the audience has to reach back in time to fill in. 

Along with her silence, Ginger is also marked by her clear alignment with the upper middle-class. Her mode of dress and posture are clearly coded with at least some measure of status. In the panel where she probably chided Patty-Jo for having played football, there is a subtle implication that femininity and status (both represented by her feet encased in fashionable high heels) intersect and prevent her from even considering playing football. Feet are not an equalizer, as Patty-Jo assumes, because Ginger's feet have become signifiers of class and femininity. Patty-Jo, on the other hand, has shredded her jumper with reckless abandon; she is not constrained by fashion or the status or gender roles implied thereby. By allowing her voice to only appear through implication and not through speech, Ormes seems to be implying that Ginger's bourgeois attitudes are associated with a fading generation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the panel where Patty-Jo addresses impoverished children and Ginger is conspicuously absent. She would never go to a place like the tenement Patty-Jo is visiting. As a fashion-conscious, status-conscious adult, she would be out of place, especially since her younger sister is addressing the children. In this panel too, Ginger has absolutely no voice; she has not said anything in the panel's immediate past because she is not there. So there is no responsibility on the reader to fill in her place by constructing her words. Rather, this panel represents a moment of the absolute present--and also the future--as we are placed squarely behind Patty-Jo and her sermon.

Ginger is representative of a generation on the verge of giving way to something new, as represented by Patty-Jo and her outspoken disregard for gender roles, status, and any other division that separates her from the world. And in the world of cartoons and comics, Patty-Jo could stay the voice of her generation forever because she could be a child forever. But on that note, there was a cartoon at the bottom of page 6 that struck me. In it Patty-Jo dusts a dress form while observing a globe. The author's analysis refers to the mannequin as "the shape she will inherit." I found this noteworthy because the mannequin's shape is highly reminiscent of Ginger's figure, and suggests that the extreme gendering of Ginger, and perhaps also her silence, might be in store for Patty-Jo as a new generation enters the picture.