The Modern Feminist Presented in World Literature
Southern New Hampshire University
Department of Liberal Arts English
The Modern Feminist Presented in World Literature
Alfred J Bennett
Dr. Reeb
Lit – 562
25 April 2021
The Modern Feminist Presented in World Literature
Without a doubt, the three pieces I am about to introduce and showcase are very different short stories that are undoubtedly modern but still address common issues that are still very common in our world today. The three introduce the reader to how feminism creates rage against oneself, but it also highlights why it is necessary to understand one’s self-identity. However, it should go without saying that the feminist lens needs to be combined with the psychoanalytic lenses because the three stories complement each other, especially when discussing women’s issues and how they relate to gender. The story written by Clarise Lispector entitled The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman shows a woman who realizes that her marriage is nothing more than a piece of paper and that she has no real place in life other than to be a slave to her husband. This piece’s context is also very similar to that of Carmen Maria Machado entitled The Husband Stitch and Tanizaki Junichiro, The Tattooer. These stories offer the reader a story that portrays the woman’s stream of consciousness and exposed their innermost thoughts and feelings towards their husbands, marriage, and society. The reality is that society has created a fractured and distorted way of looking at one’s use of experience, which can evolve into the development impossibility of communication with other people.
Through structured analysis of these three pieces of literature and supporting evidence will help prove the marginalization of women and address the fear that women have due to living in a misogynistic society. When discussing the disempowerment of women often is connected to the principal and tradition of patriarchy, which suppresses women at different levels, whether it be political, socio-economic, social, or cultural suppression, that is alive in all realms. What does this mean exactly? In an article written by Preeti S. Rawat entitled “Women's Empowerment, and General Well-Being,” she addresses these questions with the following definition:
Patriarchy is a social and ideological construct that considers men (who are the patriarchs) superior to women. Patriarchy imposes masculinity and femininity character stereotypes in society which strengthen the iniquitous power relations between men and women. Feminism is an awareness of patriarchal control, exploitation, and oppression at the material and ideological levels of women’s labor, fertility, and sexuality, in the family, at the place of work, and in the society in general, and conscious action by women and men to transform the present situation. Overcoming the belief and practice of patriarchy is termed as eve empowerment. (43)
It is oppressive behaviors such as these that affect women’s psyche but also oppress their voice. Each piece of literature allows the reader to see into a woman’s thoughts because women are taught to hold their thoughts inside. Unfortunately, women are not supposed to speak up against the oppressor due to societal norms. Because the woman is not allowed to speak, these three literature pieces give us the insight to see internally from the emotional standpoint.
This insight mimics a woman's repression in what is known as the patriarchal society through the repression of speech. Moving through the text, I will present evidence from the literature above and outside sources to prove this argument. Evidence supporting women’s rights, and as we have become more cultured, there is still a long way to protect women. Women’s voices are often overshadowed by marginalization and oppression; this oppression stems from long ago. Even in today’s modern society, there are men and even some women who want to oppress and even marginalize sex.
Literature is a reflection of our society and what is going on in our society at that time. Literature, especially modern literature, helps confront the many different cultures we are introduced to each day. This would be especially important for people here in the United States, but more importantly, around the world. The undeniable truth is that literature has an impact on modern society. Arguments can be formed around the idea that authors use their writing as a form of expression and often reflect their stream of consciousness. Often books are the windows into society to help the reader understand the world in which we live. Authors like Virginia Woolf introduced topics like equal rights for women and talked about sexuality. Authors like Woolf made it easy to connect to their stream of consciousness and even their psyche. However, before diving further into the stream of consciousness, there should be a clarification of its definition. Liz Delf, a student at Organ State, in her published works entitled “Organ State Guide to Literary Terms,” provides the following definition for the stream of consciousness:
Stream of consciousness is a narrative style that tries to capture a character’s thought process realistically. It is an interior monologue…It mimics the non-linear way our brains work; stream-of-consciousness narration includes much free association, looping repetitions, sensory observations, and strange (or even nonexistent) punctuation and syntax of which helps us better to understand a character’s psychological state and worldview. It is meant to feel like you have dipped into the stream of the character’s consciousness—or like you are a fly on the wall of their mind. (Delf)
Therefore, when the following definition is applied, it is easy to see the human conflict through the words of modern-day authors.
The three authors introduced a unique dynamic to how feminism was and is changing in our world. Clarise Lispector, the author of Daydreams of A Drunk Woman, was a beacon of light in Brazil. In an article entitled “Overlooked No More,” columnist Lucas Iberico Lozada, say’s Lispector “[had] a long public fascination with its author, particularly because she was a woman in Brazil’s male-dominated literary world” (Lozada). Thinking about that statement and how it applies here is critical to the argument presented in that Lispector had a voice; she was protesting against the patriarchal male-dominated society. When discussing Lispector's style, there is defiantly a resemblance in her writing to that of Virginia Woolf, and like Woolf, Lispector lets the reader view her stream of consciousness. Lispector is aiming for the “emotional and psychological truth” (Delf). Some scholars argue that Woolf did not have that much of an influence on Lispector’s writing. It is unmistakable that her writing has derived from Woolf’s tradition; it showcases the stylistic investigation with language that is as much a part of the modern tradition with Woolf at the literary front. Further analysis is critical to point to why Lispector was a strong force; evidence of these ideas has presented The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman.
Lispector wrote Daydreams of a Drunken Woman as a reflection of a women’s experience's methodical repression. The misogynistic and patriarchal discourse embodies the anxiety and alienation felt by the character mirror image that the characters feel in Lispector’s and Woolf’s writing. Lispector presents linguistic insufficiency issues that run through the emotional core of discourse that occurs within the story. Modern strategies enable what can be seen as an exclusive feminine narrative that ditches a woman’s consciousness against patriarchal language constraints. Lispector’s linguistic investigation depends on her open unintended dialogue and focuses disruption, which organizes the storyline as an internal speech centered on Maria's central character. Lispector also combines experimental examination and storyline management to create fundamental flexibility that reverberates Woolf and her modernist approaches.
Furthermore, when looking at feminism through the feminist lens and the psychoanalytic lens, the main character in The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman uncovering that Maria's jealousy towards other women stems from her being psychologically hurt by her husband. Maria understands the lack of thought around her in her loneliness, noticing that her philological apprehensions and bitterness of misleading depiction instantly return once again when she sees the women she so instantly hates. While Maria sits in the restraint, self-loathing herself and those around her, she also attacks the woman’s maternal traits; it is here that Lispector is pointing to Maria’s stream of consciousness, which arguments can be formed that this was how Lispector might have seen herself. However, the fixation with the other woman’s maternal traits uncovers how Maria stays bound up in gendered ways of thinking. We can conclude from this that Maria has adopted the philosophical treatment of her gender, a treatment that lessens her to the task of child-bearer and sex object. Lispector uses metaphorical reflection to allow the reader to gain access to the inner thoughts of Maria’s experiences. Maria's obsessive behavior contrasts sharply with the emptiness that she is experiencing as a wife.
The wording that Lispector is using is much like Woolf’s wording, and this element points to free ancillary debate and the issue of dislocation and points to Maria’s stream of consciousness. There is plurality in the voice of Maria, states Asher. In The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman, the above element is stated from the very beginning. However, it should be noted that Maria often during the story is telling us her story from her daydreams. Keeping in mind, Asher points to the subconscious, which she refers to as the narrator in how Maria feels about her life. As seen in the following example:
She consciously neglects her duties as wife and mother, duties that would usually prohibit her from indulging in her inner thoughts. We are enlisted in Maria’s reflections and her lingering sense of guilt: “‘My day for washing and darning socks…What a lazy bitch [you have] turned out to be!’ she scolded herself, inquisitive and pleased…shopping to be done, fish to remember” (FT 30). Maria’s guilt takes on a form of self-degradation, a sentiment that pervades the entirety of the narrative. (27)
The language used points to a woman who is unhappy with her life because she has done precisely what society has requested of her get married to have children. As she sits at dinner, Maria is the point in which her isolation reaches its boiling point. She realizes that her husband does not care if she gets up and makes his breakfast or helps him get ready for work. What Maria sees at dinner is a world of fashion and the superficiality of the restaurant’s people; Asher points to the next moment in the story in which “Maria is overwhelmed and enraged by their superficiality: “How sad it all seemed, how she despised the barren people in that restaurant, while she was plump and heavy and generous to the full” (27). Asher is arguing that Maria’s isolation sees how the people in the restaurant only exist for themselves.
Furthermore, it is Maria’s anxiety that is the result of the resentment of the other woman. Asher states that because Maria feels trapped in her marriage and the isolation that has caused her anxiety, she charges the other woman ruthlessly. Asher states,
[the] fixation with the woman’s maternal attributes reveals the ways in which Maria remains wrapped up in gendered modes of thinking. We find that Maria has internalized the ideological prescriptions of her gender, prescriptions reducing her to child-bearer and sexual object functions. She seeks out the root of her discontent: “Ah, what is wrong with me! (27)
Asher argues that Maria remains drunk to serve as a buffer or a state of consciousness in which she does not have to come to the truth with her reality. The rage ignited within the confines of her marriage has caused her to drink to forget about her problems. However, while Maria is drunk, she can also recognize her inner conflict and only speak figuratively. Lispector uses metaphorical reflections that allow the reader to see the stream of consciousness of Maria sates Asher. Asher argues that language ultimately acts as a source of oppression for Maria. Asher points to self-envisioning that Maria is experiencing; looking at the following quote helps the reader understand what Maria is experiencing.
[She is] consistently linked to bodily and maternal images as she attempts to justify her existence by way of internalized social ideologies. Maria’s anxieties appear at odds. Much like the women at the beginning of “A Society,” her identity… based on ideals of motherhood…Her search for an alternative mode of representation, a language to “describe this thing inside” her, illuminates how gendered identities in language and consciousness ultimately fail. (28)
Maria’s core conversation emerges from her chance meeting with the “secret core” within. With the story’s aesthetic movement and fundamental flexibility, Lispector fosters alternative partisanship across her political principles transcending the political structures of gender and language.
People must understand that the struggle for equality has been something that people worldwide have been fighting for women. The Los Angeles Times published an article in September of 2017 entitled “Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘Her Body and Other Parties’ Reclaims the Female Body in Subversive, Joyful Ways,” written by Ellie Robbins, discusses how women use their bodies both organic and supernaturally. The idea fits perfectly with a women’s stream of consciousness and uses their bodies to take control over a repressive society. Robbins goes on to say,
This is bodily fiction, written for and within a culture that’s rediscovering the body: through today’s feminism, with its new frankness about women’s bodies (as when legions of women called Mike Pence to tell him about their periods) and through the broader cultural shift toward valuing the experience of the body in the moment. (Robbins)
The example above discusses how women are using their bodies to shift cultural norms, standing up to the male-dominated society, and proving that women are a force in number. Men's marginalization and oppressive nature often overshadow women’s voices; this oppression stems from long ago. Even in today’s modern society, there are men and even some women who want to oppress and even marginalize sex.
Machado’s introduction to feminism has a lasting impression on the reader as it addresses marginalization and the idea that women need to take control of their bodies. In Machado’s short story entitled The Husbands Stich, Machado breaks tradition as the narrator chases her sexual aspirations, the main character eventually marries the boy and offers him love, but he has to promise that he will never unwrap the green ribbon that is tied around her neck. The husband becomes obsessed with the ribbon and the mystery surrounding it and its representation. The husband claims that a “wife should have no secrets” (Hadi), which only points to the idea that a man owns his wife. The ribbon's obsession is also passed down from father to son, and when the sun touches the ribbon, the bond between mother and son is lost.
Before moving more into the text, it is best to discuss patriarchy and how this is seen in The Husbands Stich. In an article written by Preeti S. Rawat entitled “Women's Empowerment, and General Well-Being,” she addresses what patriarchal means defined below:
Patriarchy is a social and ideological construct that considers men (who are the patriarchs) superior to women. According to Walby (1990), it is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization and where males hold authority over women, children, and property. Patriarchy imposes masculinity and femininity character stereotypes in society which strengthen the iniquitous power relations between men and women. (44)
For example, in some cultures today, in Turkey and the Middle East, patriarchy is still typical; the men dominate the relationship, and the women submit. When moving through the text of The Husbands Stitch, this practice is not very apparent at first because the women are consenting to the new type of rebellious relationship that was coming after WW-II when young adults were beginning to rebel against societal norms. However, when the husband became obsessed with the ribbon around his wife's neck, it the first clue that he expects his wife to submit to him.
In an article entitled “Articulating the Terror of Obstetric Violence in Carmen Maria Machado’s The Husbands Stitch the author highlights two stories that have an essential function in our discussion on feminism. Lucía López talks about Charlotte Perkins Gillman in the Yellow Wallpaper and Maria Machado’s The Husbands Stich; Lopez addresses how the oppressive male treats women when they are sick having a baby. Lopez opens her article with:
I have been attracted to representations of the interactions of vulnerable bodies with what I call “the medical establishment,” by which I mean state-sanctioned clinical practice, that which follows mainstream discourse and does not consider other understandings of health but the Western one. (38)
When a woman is in the hospital or a doctor’s office, typically men who have only studied the female body through text and examination, however, lack the knowledge of the mental anguish a woman goes through, including their monthly cycle of childbirth and postpartum depression. Lopez highlights that “Gilman’s text firmly aligns with the examination of mainstream medicine through the lens of literature” (38). Lopez brings this up because later in the article, she discusses how Machado’s The Husbands Stich addresses this elusive yet oppressive behavior. Lopez addresses how Gilman brings highlights the “resting cure,” which Silas Weir Mitchell popularized. His idea “consisted [of] enforced seclusion and bed rest for patients diagnosed with nervous conditions such as hysteria and neurasthenia” (38). Lopes highlights, the result of the cure is that the cure itself was damaging to the woman. In such a way, it secluded them, oppressing and leaving them without a voice. Often the cure made things worse and often driving the patient into madness.
Lopez points to the protagonist and the betrayal of the husband and the medical facility in both stories. Lopez goes on to say, “after all; we live in a time where feminism has drastically changed the power dynamics of marriages and the medical institutions securely stand on scientific grounds that should not allow for abuses of power” (39). There is a concern with how misogyny, gender bias, can infiltrate modern clinical practices and how this psychologically affects the patient. The evocation presented to us by Machado provides evidence of the danger surrounding medical practices and the danger of intimacy of a marriage, and how a woman is vulnerable when giving birth. The dangers of these practices create a layer of fog that ignites terror in the female patient. Both The Husbands Stich and The Yellow Wallpaper address this fear through symbolic language and literary argument.
Lopez also argues that Machado is highlighting the threat of the commonplace and goes on to say:
she points out that it is not only the “fears of the body as a threat to itself” that this subgenre draws from, but also and more prominently, “the fears of the larger medical institutions and authorities that claim absolute power over the body in their promise to care for and cure it” (314). That this promise goes unfulfilled is implicit, and thus “healing becomes exploitation, experimentation, and terrorization for a goal that circumvents the benefit of the individual patient” (40).
From this, Lopez identifies that the medical establishment is taking ownership of the female body and treating someone psychologically and is seen as a failure to consent with standardizing gender routine within the limits of matrimonial, discounting women’s clear decisions regarding their bodies. Shana E. Hadi wrote an article for The Stanford Daily, entitled “Her Body and Other Parties’ Gives Shape to Female stories states:
With a deft eye for astounding surreal imagery balanced by her straightforward tone, Machado emphasizes the unspoken harsh reality of many women’s lives and the violence that plagues their bodies, along with the fracturing repercussions on the mind. (Hadi)
Hadi makes a powerful statement about Machado and the abusive, misogynistic behavior that women have had to endure for centuries. Men feel that they should control women as they are supposed to be the superior sex; however, women are just as intelligent and strong as men in the literal sense.
According to Lopez, the terror that the woman faces in The Husbands Stich is obstetric violence the invokes anger in the reader. The anger that is experienced is when the female is objectified while under sedation. Lopez identifies that Machado is pointing to “absolute vulnerability in the most intimate and physical spaces and the potential for the damage it posits when we are faced with an unscrupulous clinician” (40). The husbands stitch a procedure that men have asked the doctor to perform to tighten the vagina after childbirth. The procedure’s objective is to increase the sexual pleasure of the man, but often it creates pain in the female. Lopez is eluding that the procedure itself is an “unsanctioned medical practice where stereotyped gender performativity takes precedence over the well-being of the patient” (41). It is this procedure that is presented to us in Machado’s story. Jokingly the husband askes the doctor is sedated says, “: “How much to get that extra stitch?” . . . “You offer that, right?” (16)” (41). Lopez is pointing out the oppressive, misogynist attitude that men have towards women. She is pointing out that when the woman is sedated and has no voice, she cannot comment on her care or deny the procedure because she is at the mercy of the medical facility and her husband. It is the type of care described above which still supports traditional misogynistic behavior and women’s marginalization.
Machado’s work addresses how societies' obsession with gender roles overstate the female self-detriment and male violence, which weakens female liberation and determines fundamentally distorted marriage relationships. Hadi says, “In one potent scene, she even undergoes “the husband's stitch,” which references a post-birth medical procedure to tighten the vagina and give the man additional pleasure during intercourse, despite the woman’s pain” (Hadi). At one point, the narrator points out that her husband was not a bad man, but he was the root of her hurt. Furthermore, the main character decided when raising her son; she wanted him to become a better man; than his father; the rage that has been ignited into her through the male-dominated society has caused her to resort to these actions. As his mother, she influenced the child by passing down stories that draw from women's culture. Often men disregard these stories because of their cultural views about women and their control over women. Hadi says:
Machado also reclaims these stories and female experiences as vitally necessary for a better future, especially as the act of such storytelling and discourse has created a community that thrives independently from patriarchal institutions. And as the narrative build-up would imply, the green ribbon is eventually untied, but not before the story unravels into a worthy finish. (Hadi)
Again, this draws upon the woman’s stream of consciousness, and women make sacrifices to raise their children. Women have also sacrificed to do what society expects of them and conform to the expected gender assignment.
He was looking at a different perspective on feminism from different time frames in modern society. Tanizaki Junichiro's work brings into light the climate of 1930’s Japan, and when looking at his work through the psychoanalytic lens, we can show how his writing reflects an intellectual climate and discusses sexuality and ideas surrounding perversion. Margherita Long, in a paper entitled “This Perversion Called Love”: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud, says:
Tanizaki’s realization that to be a Japanese intellectual in the 1930s was always already to be a masochist. When we appreciate his experience of interwar subjectivity as an experience of mandatory perversion, we begin to see…a subjectivity and a sexuality…in which perversion itself did not turn out to reveal, rather than a proliferation of genders, the total erasure of women. (Long 6)
Long makes an introductory statement here that Tanizaki’s apprehension that to be a Japanese philosopher was to be a masochist and that reflection is drawn upon in “The Tattooer.” However, according to Meria Muhid in an article entitled Tokusuke Utsugi’s sexual masochism in Junichiro Tanizaki’s diary of a mad older man he defines masochism as:
Sexual masochism is one example of abnormal psychology. According to George, sexual masochism is one type of paraphilia on sexual deviations. Most of the sexual masochists are male. While the object is being hurt of people with sexual masochism is the people itself (www.medicastore.com). (Muhid 163)
Tanizaki has a premise of sexual variation, particularly about sexual masochism practiced by his characters. In the following expert from “The Tattooer,” it is clear that Tanizaki purposely wrote his character as a masochist:
The clients he did accept had to leave the design and cost entirely to his two discretion—and to endure for one or even two months the excruciating pain of his needles. Deep in his heart, the young tattooer concealed a secret pleasure and a secret desire. His pleasure lay in the agony men felt as he drove his needles into them, torturing their swollen, blood-red flesh, and the louder they groaned, the keener was Seikichi's strange delight. Shading and vermilioning—these are said to be especially painful—were the techniques he most enjoyed. (Tanizaki 1-2)
This is an actual quote because it points to something, perhaps a traumatic event in his life and the rage that has led him into this type of behavior. However, he cannot act on his desire, but he can write about it, and therefore he uses his stream of consciousness to understand a woman’s thoughts.
Tanizaki still manages to fit into his work the woman’s stream of consciousness; he allows the reader to be transported into the woman’s mind as presented in the following passage, “Your feelings are revealed here," Seikichi told her with pleasure as he watched her face” (4). It is essential to understand that even though the reader does not see this from a woman’s perspective, it is the tattooer who invokes her thoughts. Tanizaki gives his main character a woman a voice, primarily through his main character. As we move through the text and supporting evidence, it supports our argument that misogynistic behavior affects women’s voices and psyche. “The advantage of reading Tanizaki’s zuihitsu psychoanalytically is that it allows us to understand the endlessly beleaguered psyche as a normative and inescapable part of modernity—itself the implicit target of Tanizaki’s critique” (Long 15). Tanizaki, in his works, also portrays power that has been held within, much like women withhold their feelings, which presents the reader a look into women’s emotional state caused by society.
In Tanizaki’s story entitled The Tattooer, looking towards this story through the feminist lens would indicate the female's male oppression. There are arguments to be made that the tattooer felt that the young girl was a blank canvas, a virgin. The tattooer shows the girl the paintings and how much she looked like the princess in the painting. However, how the girl became trapped in the tattooer’s apartment was a little creepy, and the tattooer comes across as a predator. It is this type of misogynistic behavior in which women have been fighting against for hundreds of years. When he drugs the girl so he can tattoo her back, it is almost as if he is mentally raping her, and when he is finished, that is his moment of climax. There are various types of masochism; some types revolve around the sexual drive; however, in the case presented to us by Tanizaki, it would be considered masochism without sexual drive. Arguments have been formed around the idea that one of the attributes of sexual masochism is the sense of contentment and sexual stimulation caused by physical or psychological pain. However, Muhid points out, “The emergence of sexual masochism due to sexual fantasies is on hold. [Meaning] that the result of the sexual desires are not channeled, so, the desire to deliver their sexual desire is channeled through a deviant sexual fantasy” (Muhid 164). Tanizaki is pointing to something that may have triggered s psychological event in his life, perhaps something from his childhood; however, what he is allowing the reader to see is his stream of consciousness. His thoughts show the reader that a good woman is not what she does for her man but how she can cause him to suffer. Even though the tattooer is fulfilling a fantasy with the young girl, he is being hurt through his subconscious. The triggered memory is repression that comes out, and what he finds is that a cruel woman makes her more attractive to him. There is evidence of what is going to happen presented early on in the reading as shown here:
This was a painting called "The Victims." In the middle of it a young woman stood leaning against the trunk of a cherry tree: she was gloating over a heap of men's corpses lying at her feet. Little birds fluttered about her, singing in triumph; her eyes radiated pride and joy. Was it a battlefield or a garden in spring? In this picture the girl felt that she had found something long hidden in the darkness of her own heart. (4)
So an argument could be formed that when the young girl awakes to find that she has been tattooed, she becomes angry and lashes out at him. The young girl resents him, but the tattooer did not think about the consequences of his actions because he was more concerned with his gratification. However, Tanizaki also points out that the character he has created represents oppression through his psychological trauma.
When the tattoo artist drugs the girl, the story can be discussed critically as a moment of oppression. In order to satisfy his sexual drive, the tattooer had to seduce a woman of beauty, and in this case, it was the young woman, while he preyed on the young woman knowing that what he was going to do would bring out his bad temper and therefore, he would be punished. However, when the tattooer did not get the response that he expected from the young girl when he was finished, he decides to give the young woman the painting from a long time ago; the narrator states:
“I wish to give you these pictures too,” said Seikichi, placing the scrolls before her. “Take them and go.” “All my old fears have been swept away—and you are my first victim!” She darted a glance at him as bright as a sword. A song of triumph was ringing in her ears. “Let me see your tattoo once more,” Seikichi begged. Silently the girl nodded and slipped the kimono off her shoulders. Just then, her resplendently tattooed back caught a ray of sunlight, and the spider was wreathed in flames. (Tanizaki 7)
This passage presents a couple of ideas. The first idea presented is a sense of remorse that the tattoo artist has for what he has done to the girl; he has taken away her innocence. When he presents her with the paintings, it resembles the guilt that he was feeling. The girl feels that she has been stripped of her innocence and is angry when she states, “All my old fears have been swept away—and you are my first victim” (7)! This is her way of communicating that anger to him. He has created what he has tattooed, a deadly spider. Finally, the spider is engulfed in flames representing that old-world ideal, but with the world’s modernization, many of the same issues are still present in today’s modern world.
However, we could argue that Tanizaki was not a feminist but a lover of women. With that being said, the young girl represented in “The Tattooer” was being marginalized and essentially abused by Tanizaki’s tattooer. An argument can be formed around the idea because Tanizaki wrote his literature in this nature; these were his fantasies. This was his way of acting on them through his literature because he knew that people in society would frown on his behavior. What is essential to understand about this concept is that, Like Woolf and Lispector, Tanizaki allows the reader to see his stream of consciousness, but he also allows us to see the woman’s stream of consciousness as she describes how she felt.
Through structured analysis of these three pieces of literature, women's marginalization and address the fear that women have due to living in a misogynistic society. Brought out through evidence that the disempowerment of women is connected to the principal and tradition of patriarchy, suppressing women at different levels of social definitions of both patriarchy and stream of consciousness have been provided and connected to our three short stories in one way or another, but also supported the analysis of culture. The oppressive behaviors that have been identified affect women’s psyche but also oppress their voice. The three pieces of literature allow the reader to see into a woman’s thoughts, and evidence has been provided to prove that women are not supposed to speak up against the oppressor due to cultural norms.
The oppression of women and the masculine ideals have stuck around even as we have modernized. While things have changed and improved, some still believe that they can tell a woman what to do and how they should treat their bodies. These short stories that have been analyzed reflect the undoubted nature that authors can still address some common issues in society, even in a modern world. Rage is ignited due to the patriarchy of a male-dominated society, and women have used that rage to fight back for equality. These stories also help the reader understand one's identity, which was seen more in “The Tattooer” because it reflected the author himself.
Moreover, looking at these three literature pieces allows the reader to look at the character's stream of consciousness and the author’s stream of consciousness. Considering what was going on in the world when the authors wrote their piece of literature, the reader can see the happening’s in society at that time in history. Looking at these stories through a feminist lens also allows the reader to look at how marginalization and inequality have a psychological impact on women and how it affects one gender role in society. Marginalization is very real worldwide, and it still exists; women especially are not allowed to voice their opinion, and in some cases, can be put to death. However, brave authors are humanitarians ready to speak up for the underrepresented, allowing more people to become educated about these issues and stick up for women's rights worldwide.
Works Cited
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Delf, Liz. “What Is Stream of Consciousness? || Oregon State Guide to Literary Terms.” College of Liberal Arts, 20 Apr. 2021, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-stream-consciousness. Accessed 23 April 2021.
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Hadi, Shana E. “Her Body and Other Parties' Gives Shape to Female Stories.” The Stanford Daily, 4 Feb. 2019, www.stanforddaily.com/2019/02/04/her-body-and-other-parties-gives-shape-to-female-stories. Accessed 7 April 2021.
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