Gender Issues in A Doll’s House and Harvest
Gender is a much contested concept, as slippery
as it is indispensable, a vital, but
nonetheless intensely problematic word in the contemporary critical
lexicon. The concept includes a complex
of sociological, cultural and psychological associations with it as distinct
from the biological fact of sex. The
structuring of gender relations has always been reflected in the division of
labor between the sexes. With the
development of industrial societies in the 18th and 19th
centuries, this was manifest in the development of ideology of “separate
spheres”. Patriarchal ideology according
to Miller, exaggerates biological differences between men and women, making
certain that men always have the dominant, or ‘masculine,’ roles and that women
always have the subordinate, or ‘feminine’ ones. This ideology is particularly powerful
because through conditioning, men usually secure the apparent consent of the
very women they appear. They do this
through institutions such as the academy, the church, and the family. Each of which justifies and reinforces
women’s subordinations to men with the result that most women internalize a
sense of inferiority to men. Social
theorists provide compelling reasons to expect men and women to experience relationships
differently and many empirical studies identify gender differences in specific
characteristics of social relationships.
Gender relations are determined mainly by
an interplay of factors in which societal structure, historical specificity,
cultural norms and practices, political ideologies and economic conditions
prevalent in a society play a dominant role.
A Doll’s House by Henrik
Ibsen, is a play that was written ahead of its time. Those who have read the play can quickly
reach a consensus that the major thrust of this play has something to do with
gender relations in modern society and offers us, in the actions of the heroine, a vision of the need for a new found freedom
for women amid a suffocating society governed wholly by unsympathetic and
insensitive men. It tells us the story
of Nora and Helmer and the circumstances leading to Nora’s leaving her husband
and three children in order to go out into the world at large to gain a firsthand
experience of life and to find out for herself what was right and what was
wrong. A Doll’s House was the play that
seemed at first to pose the largest challenge, raising the women’s question and
the marriage problem right across Europe.
According to Shaw, the uniqueness
of the play is borne out by the mechanism of “discussion”—the movement into a
new kind of reality with Nora’s famous words, “ We must come to a final
settlement, Torvald. During eight whole
years…we have never exchanged one serious word about serious things.” (Mcfarlane 81:1970)
The play Harvest can be read in many levels—the poor becoming donors to the
rich, the First world exploiting the Third World, aged cannibalizing youth in
quest of longevity. Apart from all these
themes, there is the serious theme of identity resulting from gender issues in
the Indian society. The character Jaya
is depicted as any other woman in an ordinary household. All of them in the locality live in abject
misery as they are the victims of social evils like unemployment, poverty,
etc. As the play is designed with the
twenty first century background, there arise job opportunities offered by an International
Firm. The play is revolving around the
contract that was signed by a man like Om,
belonging to a Third world nation like India, in favor of the First
world. There is the gradual intrusion of
the First world people in the life of the Third world people. Jaya is the only brave person in the family
who is bold enough to defy the Colonizer and vanquish him by deciding to
destroy her body at any moment he dares to advance to take it by force. Her
sense of triumph resounds in the following remarks, “I’ve discovered a new
definition for winning. Winning by
losing. I win if you lose. “ (100)
Dwelling upon the characterization of Nora
and Jaya my attempt is to focus on the process of Becoming as witnessed in the
delineation of female characters who appear to be feminine (used here as a term
with negative connotation, that is, to denote docility, weakness, dependency,
silliness and excessive frivolity) in the initial stage but get transformed
into womanish (opposite of girlish, that is, like woman who is responsible,
serious, courageous and wilful). Only
those women who have undergone this process of transformation from being to
becoming deserve the status of woman, only the bond between such women and men
will constitute a well balanced society.
By,
Rekha
Raveendran
