Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English

Rushdie's SHAME ... Fairy tale?!?

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Gopa B. Caesar:
Violent Metamorphosis

the overpowering shame changes into "one of those supernatural beings, those exterminating or avenging angels, or werewolves, or vampires, about whom we are happy to read in stories" (197).
As a child she develops a habit of tearing hair
First she kills 218 turkeys, then gives her sister's bridegroom a painful bite on the neck; finally, she begins to murder people.

Gopa B. Caesar:
Marriage Redrafted

Omar is the only man who would marry his unmarriageable daughter.
The doctor desires a brainless beauty
He is a beast inside, although a smartly clad ’beautiful’ man outside
Shameless social-climber
"a private affair; no guests, no marquees"
Not as pompous as in fairytales
Overweening father stops Omar from sleeping with his bride; Omar sleeps and impregnates the ayah
Sufiya tears off the heads of four men:
Alludes to the Shariah and four wives
Omar, however, begins to feel "a twinge of shame" about his extramarital affair with Sufiya's ayah (235).
He gradually gains awareness of the true nature of his wife's beastliness: "Sufiya Zinobia's metamorphosis must have been willed, because even an autohypnotist cannot ask herself to do what she would be unwilling to do. So then she had chosen, she had created the Beast..." (244).
Sympathises with her animality and equates it as a gesture of freedom
"proud of her strength, proud of the violence that was making her a legend, that prohibited anyone from telling her what to do, or whom to be, or what she did not "wish to hear ... nobility in ... savagery …for the first time in her life ... that girl is free" (254).
Sleeping Beauty
Fairytale like accepatance of a beast-spouse
In Heath’s term, Rushdie then is a man "aware of feminism" .
Instead of acknowledging women's right to equality, which is relatively easy, he must accept the inequality of his own status, which in turns means understanding that his "equality is the masking term for [women's] oppression”
women are not equal with me and the struggle is not for that equality
Rushdie seems to understand that, even though it may not be possible to fully identify with the female cause, he may still advocate admiration and the happy acceptance of the irreducible.
Inderpal Grewal critiques Rushdie’s ‘feminist project’
it does not form any alliance between the writer and women and it does not erase "the Self-Other opposition with which women have been patriarchally reified"
because of the "Othering," Rushdie's women have no individual identity and fit stereotypical patriarchal conceptions such as, in Sufiya's case, woman as insane and retarded yet mysterious, vampire-like and murderous, a temptress who must be feared.
Virgin-monster dichotomy: both killed
Silence or enacted: postmodern lack of closure

Gopa B. Caesar:
looking for some other women to talk from Shame??? here they goooooooo...

Bilquis Hyder is allowed to vent her long-muted scolding of her husband, but her rebukes are "full of curtains and oceans and rockets" (229-30).

Arjumand Harappa is so blindly devoted to her father that she ignores all the atrocities he commits, and thereby espouses the very hegemony that causes the oppression of women.

Virgin Ironpant

Tamanna Islam:
:)

Gopa B. Caesar:
i hope you liked it. :)

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