What happens in the life of a circus freak doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a middle class woman from the south would ever dream of concerning herself with, and yet Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden was produced by exactly one such a woman. In the short story, Welty exposes a technique of naming and disguise that has always been effective in the blatant dehumanization bigots use to degrade specific members of our social hierarchy. Welty's title character in the story never manages to escape from the diminutive appellation, Little Lee Roy, which is more or less his actual name. Because of his appearance and the persistence of this deplorable nickname it is virtually impossible for him to achieve the status of being a ‘real person’ within the …show more content…
Calling Keela a maiden transforms him in the light of anyone's external gaze from male to female. Use of the word Indian coupled with the face paint to conceal the true pigment of his skin turns him from African American to Native American. Welty’s use of this technique, and by default the other stories she has written, to condemn racial bigotry cannot be more obvious. As she walks Keela rung-by-rung down the ladder of social hierarchy, making him first worthless in the eyes of white men because he is a crippled, dwarfish black man just to then turn him into a savage who kills chickens with their bare hands and eats them whole. Then when his handlers in the circus label him the Outcast Indian Maiden, what they’re indirectly doing is reducing him further to the level of a woman who does not even have status to other natives, being labeled an outcast to the community to which she supposedly belongs. Welty uses this trope to expose both the disease of White America's racism, showing us through her language and the slang her characters use that this racism is based almost wholly on outward appearance and name-calling, summarizing the structure of the hierarchy that sustains it, where black is low, but not as low as red, and where the worth of a black man is
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota as a Yankton Sioux native (nrcprograms.org). When she was eight, she was sent to White’s Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker missionary school in Wabash, Indiana (britannica.com). Their Gertrude went though many difficult trials to learn the ways of the paleface people (white people). Gertrude was not given the proper respect she deserved as a Native American Indian girl. The palefaces were ignorant to the Native American’s way of life and because of this they had taken away many Indian’s spirits (Bonnin, 400, p.5). Gertrude’s spirit was taken away when the paleface had cut off her long braids (Bonnin, 400, p.5). I believe that Gertrude decided at that moment not to give up and show the palefaces that she was capable of going beyond her sorrows. Which leads to the theme of the story in “The School Days of an Indian Girl” (Bonnin, 397) . Furthermore, that message is no matter how many obstacles come your way do not give up, and it can be figured out because of the way the author used the setting, the author’s style of tone, and the character traits of the author to show how she was
For example, in the local school, stereotypes such as the image of the ‘wild man’ are consolidated by claiming that there was cannibalism among the indigenous people of the northwest coast (Soper-Jones 2009, 20; Robinson 2010, 68f.). Moreover, native people are still considered to be second-class citizens, which is pointed out by Lisamarie’s aunt Trudy, when she has been harassed by some white guys in a car: “[Y]ou’re a mouthy Indian, and everyone thinks we’re born sluts. Those guys would have said you were asking for it and got off scot-free”
Lorraine Hansberry’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun” is a realistic drama pivoting around a black, American family’s economic and social struggle against the prejudice that occurs in Chicago during the nineteen fifties. The Youngers’ colorful personalities cause much confrontation and anguish in their small, stifling apartment. In his essay, “A Raisin in the Sun Revisited,” J. Charles Washington, suggests that “our literary judgments, to a large extent, are determined by our own moral standards, by our adherence to the rules society deems appropriate. Generally, these standards differ according to the sex of the individual: A good man, for instance, is strong, aggressive---masculine---, whereas a good woman is sweet, gentle---feminine.” While some of Hansberry’s characters conform to these social criterions, she also strongly challenges the measures by introducing a variety of eclectic personalities.
In Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, we are presented with a young girl, Frieda, transforming into a woman in a rural African village. Frieda is faced with the realization that apartheid has ghettoized the coloreds to live in dreadful conditions. It is through the suppression of this ghetto life along with the suppression of racial and sexual stereotypes that Frieda removes herself and gains her independence. Frieda’s changing sexuality is important for her maturation into a woman. Wicomb presents a sexual hierarchy of women as viewed from a colored perspective. Men can improve their social appearance through education, but for a woman, she must get married. A necessary ingredient for a successful marriage is to be pretty as suggested by Frieda’s mother: “Poor child… What can a girl do without good looks? Who’ll marry you? We’ll have to put a peg on your nose” (164). Even in Frieda’s teenage years, she never saw herself as attractive, for she saw herself as “too plump.” This “plumpness” is a direct result from her father urging her finish all her meals, as he saw skinniness unattractive. In addition, during the train ride to school, Frieda dreamt of a fairytale in which boys were regarded as princes and her role was not that of Cinderella, but rather that of the pumpkin.
Gender inequality refers to biased and unfair treatment or perceptions of individuals based on their gender. Gender inequality is one of the major problems faced by the human society. Our society bestowed different roles on men and women respectively. It’s a hard reality that women have been ill-treated in every society for ages in India. A woman is considered as inferior to man in our society. In patriarchal society the wives are expected to be modest, meek and dutiful to their husbands and other members of families. She has to live behind the veil and has to face many restrictions by their family and society. A woman has to face this discrimination not only at her home but in schools, colleges, and at their work place also. Even the employed women are not independent in real sense, they may have the liberty of movement but they are always addressed by their kinship position by others. There are gaps between men and women in terms of literacy rate, intra house distribution of food and other means, health benefits received and so on. In the light of above arguments the present paper deliberates upon the gender inequality, the causes behind this discrimination against woman, its impact on woman and what can be done to stop this demonic practice. The paper also tries to find out the plight of women and their present status in North West states of India particularly in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, etc. Man and woman are both equal and both plays a vital role in the creation and development of their families in particular and the society in general.
Women, as stated by Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic, are often portrayed in literature as one of two binary opposites, ‘monstrous’ or ‘angelic’. Arguing throughout their theory that women are either represented as the ‘sweet dumb Snow White’ character or the ‘fierce mad Queen’2, Gilbert and Gubar expose how the female protagonist can never be understood as anything in between these two states. This dichotomy is clearly demonstrated in Felecia Hemans’s ‘The Indian City’, throughout which, the female protagonist is seen abandoning a life of angelic domesticity for one of monstrous masculinity. Consequential of this transition is the woman’s taking of her own life, which is presented by Hemans as the only way she can resolve the issue of now being monstrous.
(Views of author with respect to economic freedom and economic unfreedom derived from Development As Freedom)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a renowned South Asian Diaspora writer with her ancestral roots at Bengal. The women authors of the Indian Diaspora are the artefacts of two cultures; firstly, they are unsure of their status-quo related to the mainstream and secondly in relation to their minority group; because South Asian Diaspora itself constitutes a minority discourse in respect of the canons of globalization, neo-colonialism or ‘melting pot’. Grappling with the problem of defining their identities they put their utmost effort to shift from the margin to the center. It is this location or ‘in-between’ space which has inspired the leading women writers of Indian origin in America such as Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Narayan, Chitra
"I don't mind if my parents try to find a boy for me. Arranged marriages are still a common thing in my family. I don't know what my parents will say if I have a boyfriend here and he is from another country. I am sure that they will not adamantly reject it, but they maybe disappointed."
A Woman’s Worth When one speaks of women’s issues, the general reaction is that of frustration. It seems that the 21st century general society is already tired of hearing about the issues that women face, even when approximately half the world’s population is female (UNPD, 2002). In Indu Sundaresan’s The Twentieth Wife, the pervasive topic of gender inequality is explored through Mehrunnisa’s life experiences. Mehrunnisa’s story gives insight into the situation and social status of women in 16th century India.
Mahasweta Devi is a distinguished Indian Bengali writer, studying and writing ceaselessly and unremittingly about the life and struggles faced by the tribal communities in a number of states like Bihar, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. She is a reputed Indian writer who was born in the year 1926 into a middle class Bengali family at Dacca, Bangladesh. She received her education from the prestigious Shantiniketan founded by the great Indian philosopher and thinker, Rabindranath Tagore. Mahasweta Devi graduated from the University of Calcutta and this was followed by an MA degree in English from the Visva Bharti University.
Hence, they are trying to break us by creating barriers of religion, caste, ethnicity, and tradition.
In the novel, the main female character named Dimple Dasgupta breaks the traditional notion of an Indian wife. She is shown in the novel as a vibrant person but with a sort of mental aberration or apathy. Even while she was unmarried, she nurtured number of fixations such as the nature of husband she is going to have, the manner in which her marriage is going to take place and the kind of married life she is going to lead …etc. All her dreams and aspirations about her married life get shattered. She suffers from total loss of personality and it culminates into murder of her husband by herself
In the caste system of India there is very limited rights for females. There are cultural norms placed by castes on individuals. Like when people get married in India they can only get married to someone with they same caste. They can’t marry someone from a different caste. Unlike in America one can get married to anyone. The females in the caste system have to follow the norm of society and caste. Also the caste system is India is very strict, as conveyed in the article by Andre Beteille, “caste in India is perceived by millions of people today as a particularly rigid and oppressive form of inequality.” (Beteille 1990: 491). They rights of a women in the caste system is very limited since they are looked down upon. In an article by Ashwini
The theme of modern woman’s existential struggle to establish her own identity in order her individuality surfaces quite often in the novels of Indian women novelists of post-independence age as can be seen in the works of kamala Markandaya, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Anita Desai and Nayantara Sehgal. The women writers of India have given a new dimension to the Indian literature. Indian English literature has developed over a period of time and writing in English did not start in a day. It took many years and several distinguished personalities to bring the present status and distinction to Indian English literature. Indian literature is not only about novels, it is also about poetries and short stories. Before the rise of novels, several women writers composed songs, short stories and small plays. It is still believed that women are the upholders of the rich Indian tradition of fables, storytelling and more. In the mid-nineteenth century, more women started to write in the English language. With the passage of time,