But if Foley doesn't want anyone to know about the other man, the best thing he can do, surely, is drive on and ignore Selby? Stopping actually gives Selby a good look at his fellow conspirator: quite enough for ID parade purposes, one imagines! I agree that Foley's motivation probably isn't in fact sexual, it's actually harder to explain than that. He has a weird self-destructive impulse (which endangers others too) to show off, almost, about his spying; to flirt with discovery and capture just because he can. And the idiocy of stopping to give Sel a lift, and Foley's smug self-satisfaction is really coming out of that. But Selby doesn't know about the spying, obviously, he just perceives uncomfortable chumminess and a sense of things being 'wrong', and the explanation he reaches for is one that's unfortunately quite familiar for a lot of young people.
I think 13- and 14-year-olds in the late 1940s might well have lacked a vocabulary to talk about this, but I don't think they'd be ignorant of the fact of it. Nicola's analogy of prefects abusing their power over younger schoolboys is in one sense inadequate, but it's also spot on: she's expressing the sense of sexualised aggression that you intuit from Hughes's Flashman, for example. There are texts (written for what would now be called an YA audience) of much earlier date than Traitor in which prefects' sexual exploitation of younger boys is unequivocally if decorously discussed: I happen just to have read it, so it's the example that comes straight to mind, but it's an important theme in E.F. Benson's David Blaize (1916).
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-06-21 11:10 pm (UTC)I think 13- and 14-year-olds in the late 1940s might well have lacked a vocabulary to talk about this, but I don't think they'd be ignorant of the fact of it. Nicola's analogy of prefects abusing their power over younger schoolboys is in one sense inadequate, but it's also spot on: she's expressing the sense of sexualised aggression that you intuit from Hughes's Flashman, for example. There are texts (written for what would now be called an YA audience) of much earlier date than Traitor in which prefects' sexual exploitation of younger boys is unequivocally if decorously discussed: I happen just to have read it, so it's the example that comes straight to mind, but it's an important theme in E.F. Benson's David Blaize (1916).