Patriarchy in Shyam Selvadurai’s Pigs Can’t Fly
Woman is not born: she is made. She becomes the symbol of this and that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe and in the making, her humanity is destroyed. ~Andrea Dworkin
Patriarchy is a universal system in which women are dominated. Women, in continents as diverse as Iran and China, have been subjugated through social measures such as female circumcision and bound feet. Yet as Andrea Dworkin so neatly stated, subjugation often takes more devious forms, through the stereotyping of gender roles, attempts to “fix” women by stereotyping them as spineless “natural homemakers” or monstrous hideous figures and thereby justifying patriarchy as through stereotyping men as having more initiative and intelligence. This devious method of subjugating women is similarly reproduced in Shyam Selvandurai’s “Pigs Can’t Fly”. Although it is ostensibly about a boy’s childhood, I believe that it reinforces patriarchy through the skilful use of characterization, filters, narrators and setting.
Before explicating my argument, I would like to clarify a few key terms I have borrowed mostly from Seymour Chatman in analyzing the story. The only exception, characterization, is E.M. Forster’s concept of round and flat characters where flat characters are predictable because they are dominated by a single trait unlike round characters with multiple, sometimes conflicting traits dominating their personality. Filter, here, is used to denote what is commonly known as a character’s point of view. Narrator-characters are characters that function as characters and narrators or otherwise known as first person narrators.
It is fascinating to note that the narrator and filter through whom the story u...
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...chal constructions of “correct” female and male behaviour by appealing to natural laws (“Because the sky is so high and pigs can’t fly”). Arjie’s unhappiness, however, shows implicit criticism of patriarchy as it cannot satisfy him.
It is therefore evident that “Pigs Can’t Fly” is not a simple story about a child’s growing up process. Its adept use of various elements of discourse pushes it beyond a simple narrative into the realm of a mature narrative whose ambiguous meanings (over its support for patriarchy) mirrors a world of uncertainty with no absolutes governing. The story’s refusal to pigeonhole itself is for me, a source of beauty and complexity.
Works Cited
Selvadurai, Shyam. "Pigs Can't Fly." Funny Boy. New York: Vintage, 1995: 1-40.
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1978.
D'hoker, Elke, and Gunther Martens, eds. Narrative unreliability in the twentieth-century first-person novel. Vol. 14. Walter de Gruyter, 2008.
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Mittel, J., 2007. Film and Television Narrative. In: D. Herman, ed. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.156-171.
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