WOMAN AS ‘MOON’, MAN AS ‘SUN’
2014; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2378-3524
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Gender, and Advertising
ResumoPhallocentrism stands for women's representation and functions as one of the social arrangements that produce gender identities. In The Newly Born Woman, Helene Cixous evoked phallocentrism through a list of pair terms. She associated man with activity, sun, culture, day, father, head, intelligible, logos and woman with passivity, moon, nature, night, mother, heart, sensitive, pathos. Woman is seen as secondary, forever, the weaker of the two.Keesey (1998: 237) argues that:the stereotypes of women in literature can be either positive or negative: either spiritual (good) or material (evil). But both poles of this binary opposition result in inauthentic characters. The good woman is one who exists for the purpose of benefiting the male. She may be a wife or mother who, in a sense, is a servant to the male. Perhaps the female figure who best illustrates this positive but inauthentic persona is Mary, the mother of Jesus. She serves as an inspiration and as a virginal ideal. The first woman Eve, however, is an example of the evil, materialistic female stereotype. Literature and art provide many examples of women like Eve who are nothing but hindrances for men. Whichever of these two categories a female character may fall into, such inauthentic women serve one purpose: man's aesthetic need.The postwar world of the 1920s may have been exchanging outmoded values and customs for new freedoms and attitudes, but as Fitzgerald's novels The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise testify, the power relations of gender remained largely unchanged in the aftermath of World War I. The sexual and social freedoms The Great Gatsby reveals did not really mean significant differences in men's and women's roles and expectations:women remain prisoners of patriarchy. They are either commodities to be possessed and discarded by brutish louts such as Tom Buchanan or embodiments of an ideal for romantics such as Jay Gatsby. Either status essentially denies women their integrity (Pelzer, 2003:127).Pelzer explains that midway through the dinner party with which The Great Gatsby opens, Daisy Buchanan makes the following confession to the narrator Nick Carra way. At the birth of her daughter three years before, she confides, she cried when she found out her child's sex: I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool (Great Gatsby. 21). Daisy's perspective provides a focus for analyzing gender in Fitzgerald's novel (127).A woman in a man-ruled world can only hurt herself by trying to break the divine order assigned to her by patriarchal ideology. Therefore, as Daisy has come to realize, ignorance is bliss. However, it appears to us that Daisy fails to connect her situation to that of women in general. In fact, despite complaining, she fully accepts the role ascribed to her by patriarchy and her so-called sadness about her situation is just a mask she puts on once in a while to impress others (such as her cousin Nick Carra way). It also seems to us that the only thing Daisy knows is to behave in an irrational, submissive way.To Gatsby the green light at the end of Daisy's pier and the white freshness and golden radiance emblematic of her name, all suggest the possibility of achieving a dream. Just as Pelzer has pointed out, at the best, women in Fitzgerald's novels can become embodiments of the ideal, still basically muted objects, but whose beauty is worthy to be possessed. In Jay's view, to possess Daisy is to possesssomething, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. (Great Gatsby: 117)Gatsby, as a symbol of man as sun, comes to orient his life in relation to the green light burning at the end of Daisy's pier. Seen from across the distance and all other impediments that separate him from Daisy, the green light offers Gatsby an inaccessible focus for his yearning, something to stretch his arms towards, as he does. …
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