Gender Issues in A Doll’s House and Harvest

     Gender is a much contested concept, as slippery as it is indispensable, a vital,  but nonetheless intensely problematic word in the contemporary critical lexicon.  The concept includes a complex of sociological, cultural and psychological associations with it as distinct from the biological fact of sex.  The structuring of gender relations has always been reflected in the division of labor between the sexes.  With the development of industrial societies in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, this was manifest in the development of ideology of “separate spheres”.  Patriarchal ideology according to Miller, exaggerates biological differences between men and women, making certain that men always have the dominant, or ‘masculine,’ roles and that women always have the subordinate, or ‘feminine’ ones.  This ideology is particularly powerful because through conditioning, men usually secure the apparent consent of the very women they appear.  They do this through institutions such as the academy, the church, and the family.  Each of which justifies and reinforces women’s subordinations to men with the result that most women internalize a sense of inferiority to men.  Social theorists provide compelling reasons to expect men and women to experience relationships differently and many empirical studies identify gender differences in specific characteristics of social relationships. 

     Gender relations are determined mainly by an interplay of factors in which societal structure, historical specificity, cultural norms and practices, political ideologies and economic conditions prevalent in a society play a dominant role.  A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, is a play that was written ahead of its time.  Those who have read the play can quickly reach a consensus that the major thrust of this play has something to do with gender relations in modern society and offers us,  in the actions of the heroine,  a vision of the need for a new found freedom for women amid a suffocating society governed wholly by unsympathetic and insensitive men.  It tells us the story of Nora and Helmer and the circumstances leading to Nora’s leaving her husband and three children in order to go out into the world at large to gain a firsthand experience of life and to find out for herself what was right and what was wrong.  A Doll’s House was the play that seemed at first to pose the largest challenge, raising the women’s question and the marriage problem right across Europe.  According to Shaw,  the uniqueness of the play is borne out by the mechanism of “discussion”—the movement into a new kind of reality with Nora’s famous words, “ We must come to a final settlement, Torvald.  During eight whole years…we have never exchanged one serious word about serious things.”  (Mcfarlane 81:1970)

  

     The play Harvest can be read in many levels—the poor becoming donors to the rich, the First world exploiting the Third World, aged cannibalizing youth in quest of longevity.  Apart from all these themes, there is the serious theme of identity resulting from gender issues in the Indian society.  The character Jaya is depicted as any other woman in an ordinary household.  All of them in the locality live in abject misery as they are the victims of social evils like unemployment, poverty, etc.  As the play is designed with the twenty first century background, there arise job opportunities offered by an International Firm.  The play is revolving around the contract that was signed by a man like Om,  belonging to a Third world nation like India, in favor of the First world.  There is the gradual intrusion of the First world people in the life of the Third world people.  Jaya is the only brave person in the family who is bold enough to defy the Colonizer and vanquish him by deciding to destroy her body at any moment he dares to advance to take it by force. Her sense of triumph resounds in the following remarks, “I’ve discovered a new definition for winning.  Winning by losing. I win if you lose. “ (100)

     Dwelling upon the characterization of Nora and Jaya my attempt is to focus on the process of Becoming as witnessed in the delineation of female characters who appear to be feminine (used here as a term with negative connotation, that is, to denote docility, weakness, dependency, silliness and excessive frivolity) in the initial stage but get transformed into womanish (opposite of girlish, that is, like woman who is responsible, serious, courageous and wilful).  Only those women who have undergone this process of transformation from being to becoming deserve the status of woman, only the bond between such women and men will constitute a well balanced society.

                                                                                                                                       By,

                                                                                                                                       Rekha Raveendran