Feminism Analysis by Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Kincaid, and Stephen King - Literature review Example

Feminism: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier: Feminism is commonly understood to be the women’s movement for political, social, educational and economicequality with men. While the United States and Europe have been the geo-political arenas for feminist ideas, the rest of the world is also catching up. Feminist issues range from “access to employment, education, child care, contraception, and abortion, to equality in the workplace, changing family roles, redress for sexual harassment in the workplace, and the need for equal political representation”. The object of this essay is to discuss the following three books from the feminist perspective: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Lucy by Jamaica Kincard and Carrie by Stephen King. The novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier belongs to two genres – romance and crime. Though the two categories might appear incongruous, the author uses the suspense and intrigue created by the element of crime to portray in detail the relationship between the lady protagonist and her new found love Maxim. The novel is a feminist one on two counts – firstly the internal conflict and uncertainty associated with the girl narrator’s relationship with Maxim; secondly the aristocratic and self-assured sexuality of Maxim’s deceased wife Rebecca. The feminist underpinnings of the book come to surface when the young narrator compares herself to Rebecca and Maxim and feels inferior to both. What make the girl apprehensive about her romance is not just her youth and no experience of intimate relationships before, but more importantly its expression in the class difference between her and Maxim, and also her and Rebecca. Her shabby and inelegant clothes draw critical remarks; she is also reminded of how much she actually earns, and also of her “down-at-heel middle-class niceness”. In essence, she and Maxim belong to different social classes, which are made explicit by him when he utters the following words: “instead of being companion to Mrs. Van Hopper you become mine, and your duties will be almost exactly the same” (p.58). This allusion here is a demonstration of how class interprets and regulates sexual behavior and expectations. The girl’s jealousy of Rebecca arises from her perception that while the former “is no great lady”, the latter was the “mistress of Manderley”. The girl’s aspiration to acquire the passionate sexual flair of the aristocratic Rebecca indicates that she found the limits on sexual expression in a bourgeois setup are inadequate. The girl sees Rebecca as a more mature person, both socially and sexually. As the novel progresses, the girl idealizes Rebecca as the epitome of feminine sexuality which her own middle class background excludes. For the girl, acquiring a secure social identity as Maxims wife would mean re-interpreting Rebecca’s qualities. This meant that Rebecca’s image has to be altered from an idealized one to a despicable one. And as the novel comes to a close, Rebecca, the once perfect lady of the house, is branded by the narrator as a lesbian and a whore. Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid: Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy is another work that could be classified under the feminist canon. The feminist expressions in this five-part novel could be found in the exchanges between the women characters. The imaginative and detailed inquiry into the relationships between mothers and daughters, rich and poor, and black and white in the book brings forth the author’s thoughts on feminism. The fact that Lucy is a semi-autobiographical account of Kincaid’s life experiences makes its voice all the more authentic. The applicability of feminist theories in Rebecca was in the context of the narrator’s relationship with Maxim and his dead Mistress Rebecca. In Lucy, by contrast, we see Jamaica Kincaid’s exploration of subtleties and intricacies involved in relationships between different female characters in the story. Feminism is usually explored in the backdrop of the rights and privileges enjoyed by men. But Lucy explores the experiences of Lucy Josephine Potter (the protagonist in the novel) as an au pair to a rich white family living in New York. The voice of Lucy Potter resonates with the voice of the author herself, in that the socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds of the author and her heroine are very similar. In this respect, the novel assumes a historical/colonial backdrop alongside its obvious feminist perspectives. The fact that Lucy is a Jamaican immigrant of African origin has historical undercurrents with the institution of black slavery in America. For instance, she compares the small room given to her by her white employers with a box for the shipment of cargo – a phrase that is commonly used during the years of the slave trade. The idea of cargo-and the strong denial that follows it, "But I was not cargo"--refers to the transport of black slaves to the Americas, connecting the history of black slavery to the lead protagonist’s position of a servant to her white masters, with her little room resembling a prison cell. Toward the end of the novel, Lucy alludes to this historical metaphor of slavery. Her white employers Mariah and Lewis, kind though they are, fail to liberate Lucy from her bondage. If anything, their very kindness is a statement of Lucy’s distance from their personal lives and that she is confined to the rigid system of class hierarchy and racial exploitation. But, Lucy’s refusal to see herself as a “cargo” toward the end of the novel is suggestive of her feminist consciousness. Carrie by Stephen King: While novels such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’, Margaret Atwood’s ‘Surfacing’ are essential entries in the feminist literary canon, Stephen King’s Carrie does not belong in this company. The crucial difference is that almost all novels that explore femininity and women’s identity are written by women authors themselves. Keeping with the trend, Stephen King’s attempted portrayal of a woman’s innermost thoughts is quite inadequate. Carrie is a book not so much about women, but rather men’s perceptions of women. Not surprisingly, coming from a male author, the book is full of gender and racial stereotyping of women. The depiction of black women in the book exemplifies this tendency. It will not be an exaggeration to state that Carrie is a poorly conceived fairy tale of a woman’s revenge, whose violence returned to older oral versions that gave women more power. Through Carrie, Stephen King gives vent to some of the common apprehensions that men have about women’s physiology, including that of menstrual periods. Carrie fails as a feminist novel on account of the author’s inability to comprehend and master an unfamiliar and intimately female nature of the subject matter. Strangely enough, the author and his created character (Carrie) seem to be in exactly the same unfamiliar territory for the first time, that of the female sexuality and body. With all its apparent flaws, Carrie was a bold statement on femininity, in that it was published in 1974, when menstrual taboos and religious origins of misogyny were not openly discussed. In the novel, the female protagonist Carrie is shown to be a victim of her mother, who has been deeply indoctrinated with Judeo-Christian notions of misogyny. Carrie’s mother demonizes her own daughters body and inculcates in Carrie’s formative psyche a sense of sin and evil associated with her body, as the following exchange from the book succinctly illustrates: "And God made Eve from the rib of Adam," Momma said ... [thumping] Carrie with the side of her foot and Carrie screamed. "Get up, woman. Lets ... pray to Jesus for our woman-weak, wicked ... souls. "Momma—".... "And Eve was weak and—say it, woman. Say it!" "No. Momma, please help me—" The foot swung. Carrie screamed. "And Eve was weak and loosed the raven on the world," Momma continued, "and the raven was called Sin and the first Sin was Intercourse. And the Lord visited Eve with a Curse . . . of Blood . . . and Eve found that her belly had grown big with child." (p.54) Read More