Who is their Role Model
All
movement for woman's liberty, equality and feminism have led to the emergence
of New Woman who is for all practical purposes a Hybrid Woman.
When
someone is stranded in the marsh, all efforts to survive drag him/her deepest
in pluff mud.
This paradoxical
situation does not stop a person from making efforts unless some rescuer yells
from the bank to stop making efforts and the subconscious mind acknowledges the
possibility of survival.
There
is no doubt that both the genders were bruised while walking shoulder to
shoulder. The going got tough and the cost was born by society on the whole.
But it helped to draw a conclusion “Women are the superior gender than men”.
Read a
part of the act from the famous play ‘The Way of the World’ by William Congreve
(1670-1729). The context is a marriage proposal between Mirabell and Milament,
Mirabell:
If women had an identity crisis three hundred
years back
When women were under the process of making
(remember One is not born rather
Interestingly, the overlapping of the spheres of Psychological
dimensions of the women are not in conflict with males but other females.
All
movement for woman's liberty, equality and feminism have led to the emergence
of New Woman who is for all practical purposes a Hybrid Woman.
When
someone is stranded in the marsh, all efforts to survive drag him/her deepest
in pluff mud.
This paradoxical
situation does not stop a person from making efforts unless some rescuer yells
from the bank to stop making efforts and the subconscious mind acknowledges the
possibility of survival.
There
is no doubt that both the genders were bruised while walking shoulder to
shoulder. The going got tough and the cost was born by society on the whole.
But it helped to draw a conclusion “Women are the superior gender than men”.
Read a
part of the act from the famous play ‘The Way of the World’ by William Congreve
(1670-1729). The context is a marriage proposal between Mirabell and Milament,
Mirabell:
Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your demands are pretty
reasonable.
Millamant :
Trifles; as liberty to pay and receive visits to and from whom I please; to write
and receive letters, without interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear
what I please, and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to
have no obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don’t like, because
they are your acquaintance, or to be intimate with fools, because they may be
your relations. Come to dinner when I please, dine in my dressing- room when
I’m out of humour , without giving a reason. To have my closet inviolate; to be
sole empress of my tea-table, which you must never presume to approach without
first asking leave. And lastly, wherever I am, you shall always knock at the
door before you come in.”
If women had an identity crisis three hundred
years back( the play was published in the year 1700, when as always society was
undergoing a transformation (restoration age), and women were sick of men (as
always ) , who took women for granted after marriage, they still are no way
different and thus justify the title
“The Way of the World”.
When women were under the process of making
(remember One is not born rather becomes a woman ~ Simone De Beauvoir) the
society conspires to sow the seeds of inferiority complex in the subconscious mind of
women and takes the yield of her conflicts. The women herself start enjoying the game and becomes sadomasochist.
Interestingly, the overlapping of the spheres of Psychological
dimensions of the women are not in conflict with males but other females.
Some women are
always smart enough to understand any effort made to scare them and plant seeds
of inferiority complex and retort back.
In Hamlet Act 1
scene III Laertes say to her sister Ophelia
Fear it, Ophelia,
fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the moon:
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes:
The canker galls the infants of the spring,
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
Be wary then; best safety lies in fear:
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the moon:
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes:
The canker galls the infants of the spring,
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
Be wary then; best safety lies in fear:
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.
Ophelia refuses to
be intimidated:
I shall the effect
of this good lesson keep,
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.
Ophelia and
Millament are just two examples. The real life situations are full of women who
refuse to accept a Hybrid Role Model designed by Chauvinistic Patriarchal
society.
Other Related Posts
Life of Virginia Woolf
Fourth Wave Feminism
Women in Combat Role
Contemporary Feminism in Indian English Novels
Negative Feminism
Modern Woman in The Wasteland By T.S.Eliot
Other Related Posts
Life of Virginia Woolf
Fourth Wave Feminism
Women in Combat Role
Contemporary Feminism in Indian English Novels
Negative Feminism
Modern Woman in The Wasteland By T.S.Eliot
© Vipin Behari Goyal
Author of World is Conical'
