Toni Morrison Sula and Mahasweta Devi Breast Giver - Essay Example

For a book of this stature, most readers wanted a heroine they could identify with- someone who was basically good despite her minor flaws and few blunders- someone like Nel. But that is not to be. Sula is the protagonist of the novel and she is by no means a traditional heroine. In fact for many, she is an evil woman who refuses to conform to societal expectations of her and does some truly inexcusable things such as sleeping with her best friend's husband. Sula presents a different, unique but definitely negative image of a woman.

But it was not done to highlight the evil side of women instead it was done more with the purpose of asserting women rights and independence. Women rights and their position in the society is also the topic of controversial story Breast Giver by Indian author Mahasweta Devi. The story revolves around a woman Joshuda who considers her breasts her chief possession since they bring food for her family. She is hired as a professional mother for several children in a high class Brahmin family referred to as the big house in the story.

The story deals with the subject of unpaid labor and a woman's reproductive capabilities going unwaged. Joshuda's low caste body that goes from being the most fruitful to decayed and diseased is used as an allegory and thus the entire plot can be considered allegorical. For many in the west, this story may appear too fictitious to ever be true but we must not forget that this is about an Indian woman in a small town of India where breast feeding children of wealthy families had been a custom for a very long time.

The author chooses to highlight the social divide as well the collapse of Mother India myth. She uses Joshuda's body as a representation of third world countries while the big house represents the capitalist bourgeois in the developed world. While the capitalist powers have always been a source of contention in India, the author explains that by creating such vast social divisions, we are actually fostering the very capitalist forces that we otherwise vehemently oppose. Spivak in her analysis of the story thus asserts that the fictional character Jashoda 'calls into question that aspect of Western Marxist feminism which, from the point of view of work, trivializes the theory of value and, from the point of view of mothering as work, ignores the mother as subject' (Spivak 1987:258).

'Breast Giver', further argues that in this story 'we see cancer rather than the clitoral orgasm as the excess of the woman's body' (Spivak 1993:90). Breast giver highlights in almost dramatic fashion the exploitation of a woman's body in much the same way as colonies of imperial powers had once been exploited. The gruesome death of Jashoda from breast cancer is another important highlight of this work as Spivak notices the importance of the phrase, 'The sores on her breast kept mocking her with a hundred mouths, a hundred eyes' (Spivak 1987:260).

Sula is the story of two black women coming of age in Ohio sometime during the two world wars. Sula is wild and aggressive woman with an individualistic streak and a strong desire to break free of tradition and rules. Nel on the other hand is the compassionate gentle figure that can best be described as a 'nice' person. But Sula is not interested in being the conformist. She is an independent woman whose personality is largely shaped by the place she lived in- Bottom. Bottom was not even half as good as it was made out