Blooms At Night Gender Identity Essay

Throughout the semester, one of the main topics that we focused on and that was found most interesting was gender identity and how it has grown and transferred into everyday life. Gender identity can be defined as a learned trait of how someone perceives their own gender and can be used to describe many different topics such as gender roles, homosexuality, and gender ambiguities. Each of these topics of gender identity can be found in a numerous amount of the works that we read including Cereus Blooms at Night, Anowa, and A Passage to India. The topic of gender identity is viewed as one finding themselves; however, in these texts, gender identity is being aware of how you feel about yourself and discovering when and how you want to speak up and show it. In Cereus Blooms at Night the storyline is built around situations of gender identity of Nurse

However, he ends up marrying his adopted sister’s childhood friend, Sarah, and they have two daughters together: Mala and Asha. Lavinia and Sarah realize that they fell in love and try to run away with the girls, but are not able to take the girls with them. This leads to Chad becomes aggressive with the girls and sexually abusing them. These circumstances were not common for a small town at the time of the story. Gender identity is a major theme here because Lavinia and Sarah knew that they love each other for a long time, and they figured out who they were meant to be. Since Lavinia and Sarah grew up together, it is common to think that because of peer influence they fell in love easily. By both young girls being able to reflect their true nature with each other, this could be the case of self-identification. Self-identification is plausible at a young age because this is figuring out how someone truly feels about themselves before they show it to others (Kornienko