Indoctrination: Identity And Identity

The indoctrination starts from the infant stage itself. Apart from familial pressures to adopt the societal norms, there is the urge to ‘identify with’. “Much of what we live by and attribute to nature or destiny is, in reality, a pervasive cultural mythology” (Kolbenschlag xiv). Children’s tales or fairy tales are prime examples of where such indoctrinations masquerade. Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture, they become cultural myth. “They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us” (Dworkin 34). Lieberman in his essay “Some Day My Prince Will Come” draws attention towards the influence of the stories on identity formation, “We must consider the possibility that the classical attributes of ‘feminity’ found in these stories are in fact imprinted in

They are archetypal good women — victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate, confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, or question. Sometimes they are forced to do housework…. That one other figure of female good, the good fairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes or virtue. Her power cannot match, only occasionally moderate, the power of the wicked witch. She does have one physical activity at which she excels —she waves her wand. She is beautiful, good, and unearthly. (42-3)

The witches of older literatures were the stereotyped images showing more a hybrid creature with some similarity to a woman. These women were isolated and alienated from the society and lived on the fringes of civilization. They became trope for something much larger. It was the personification of the inner fear of man towards women. “These are the same fears that led early modems to demonize the domestic scold or any woman attempting to usurp patriarchal power structures or gender hierarchies” (Williams 3). They were repulsive and did not evoke any empathy or pathos but rather we felt only fear and