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Theory of magical realism
Second phase of feminism in indian literature
Magical realism and its uses
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Chitra Banerjee’s The Mistress of Spices is a diasporic tale built amidst a stream of voices, both male & female, sharing their joys and sorrows as immigrants to the United States. The author interweaves her text with strands of Magical Realism, Postcolonial Criticism and Feminine discourse to produce a patchwork of messages that overlap but never contradict. The novel relates the story of Tilo, a Mistress of Spices. She is a priestess who knows the secrets of all spices. Her background has been etched out to leave an indelible impression on the mind of readers: In the opening scene, the story appears to be a normal story located in India where the birth of a girl is still looked upon as a curse. People visit temples, offer prayers and perform rituals and beg for a male child. The Hindus It was an island occupied by females only and it immediately brings to our mind tales related to feminist utopia. An island populated by females only. The Old woman would hold hands of the young girls and watched. If the hands were smooth and pliant; if the spices placed on the palms sang their songs, the girls would be accepted or else they were hurled into the sea: Spices have strong colonial connotations and they also symbolise the subversive power of the postcolonial era. When we look back down the lanes and by lanes of history, the spices had first allured, enchanted and enslaved the foreign travelers with their latent powers. In the course of time these travelers became the rulers of the land. In this tale of dreams and desires, the spices are mastered by a female, incidentally called Mistress rendering a distinct colonial master-slave flavour. As long as Tilo follows the rules of the game, the spices obey her silently. Once she transgresses, the equation changes
The constant struggle present in the novel is the conflict between the native world and the white world. It is a struggle between community and isolation, between the natural and material. Silko uses the characters in the novel to show the positive and negative influences of the contact of cultures. Specifically, the characters Tayo, Emo, and Betonie are prime examples of the manifestation of the two worlds and the effects it has on each characters actions, dispositions and beliefs.
The House on Mango Street is the tale about a young girl named Esperanza who is maturing throughout the text. In it Esperanza documents the events and people who make up Mango Street. It is through this community that Esperanza’s ideas and concepts of the relationships between men and women are shaped. She provides detailed accounts about the oppression of women at not only the hands of men who make up Mango Street but also how the community contributes to this oppression. As the young girls and women of Mango Street try to navigate the world they must deal with a patriarchal society that seeks to keep them confined. By growing up in this environment where women are confined Esperanza seeks desperately to depart from Mango Street for fear
Conflict, incorporation, mestizaje, and social mobility have been unremitting, formative topics throughout the history of Latin America. Whether social and cultural mixing between the Indians and the Europeans, the Indians and the Africans, or the Europeans and the Africans, it cannot be denied that the theme of mestizaje and the social structures that came to exist in Latin America were definitive in shaping nearly every aspect of this time period from formation to revolution. This cross-mixing and combination of groups and people across varied social strata brought to the region a myriad of cultural, political, religious, and economic impositions, but what is most interesting is the role that marriage, concubinage, and romantic relations played in this period. Within this paper, I will argue that within the Colonial World, these institutions were hardly founded either solely or even minutely in love, but in fact, were economic and social institutions that served as a primary outlet to both uphold and build social hierarchy, to achieve honor and status, and to act as a tool for socio-cultural mobility. Within our course, we spoke extensively about the life and story of Chica Da Silva, and how concubinage was one of the most common ways for female slaves to earn liberty during the colonial period.
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007. Print.
They also discuss how the gender bias in the culture lead to many girl pregnancy being aborted or infants being killed. There is measures put in place to try to stop this, but it is still going on. There is an orphanage mentioned that 99 out of every hundred babies there are girls (Detective, 2008).
The novel focuses on multiple women and their experiences with the practice of bacha posh. The first woman presented
Madeleine Thien’s “Simple Recipes” is a story of an immigrant family and their struggles to assimilate to a new culture. The story follows a father and daughter who prepare Malaysian food, with Malaysian customs in their Canadian home. While the father and daughter work at home, the mother and son do otherwise outside the home, assimilating themselves into Canadian culture. The story culminates in a violent beating to the son by his father with a bamboo stick, an Asian tool. The violent episode served as an attempt by the father to beat the culture back into him: “The bamboo drops silently. It rips the skin on my brothers back” (333) Violence plays a key role in the family dynamic and effects each and every character presented in the story
To understand fully the implicit meaning and cultural challenges the film presents, a general knowledge of the film’s contents must be presented. The protagonist, Tita, suffers from typical Hispanic cultural oppression. The family rule, a common rule in this culture, was that the youngest daughter is to remain unwed for the duration of her mother’s life, and remain home to care for her. Mama Elena offers her daughter, Tita’s older sister Rosaura, to wed a man named Pedro, who is unknowingly in mutual love with Tita. Tita is forced to bake the cake for the wedding, which contains many tears that she cried during the process. Tita’s bitter tears cause all the wedding guests to become ill after consuming the cake, and Tita discovers she can influence others through her cooking. Throughout the film, Tita’s cooking plays an important role in all the events that transpire.
Islands were designed by the government to preserve society’s lack of knowledge of the past and new, curious ideas. Those who are sent to the island are described as, “the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren 't satisfied with orthodoxy, who 've got independent ideas of their own.” Since society lacks knowledge and curious thinking, those who do not fit that standard are sent away to prevent their ideas and curiosities from spreading throughout
Similarly, the issue of gendercide is seen in the film “It’s a Girl”. Gendercide is not only executed through feticide, but is also present in older, usually married women through dowry and other forms of gender based violence. The film takes place in patriarchally structured India and China, and opens by disclosing the ratio of boys to girls in the world, 105:100, and then specifies that ratio in nations that value male lives, which is 140:100 (0:05). Parents in these nations often kill their young female children, justifying the act by noting that the children will die in one minute (usually via asphyxiation), rather than suffer day by day existing as a woman in a male-privileged society (0:08). When women in India get married, their families
In the short story, “Girl,” the narrator describes certain tasks a woman should be responsible for based on the narrator’s culture, time period, and social standing. This story also reflects the coming of age of this girl, her transition into a lady, and shows the age gap between the mother and the daughter. The mother has certain beliefs that she is trying to pass to her daughter for her well-being, but the daughter is confused by this regimented life style. The author, Jamaica Kincaid, uses various tones to show a second person point of view and repetition to demonstrate what these responsibilities felt like, how she had to behave based on her social standing, and how to follow traditional customs.
Johnson, Pauline. "The Lost Island." An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Ed. Donna Bennet and Ed. Russell Brown. Third Edition. Canada: Oxford University Press, 2010. 233-235. Print.
Nunez-Harrell, Elizabeth. "The Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian Woman in Fiction." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 31.2 (1985): 281-293.
Nunez-Harrell, Elizabeth. "The Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian Woman in Fiction." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 31.2 (1985): 281-293.
the European era in Indian history. The lucrative trade in spices of Malabar - in modern Kerala - had tempted