Monthly Connections January, Feminism

I think I've always considered myself somewhat of a feminist, and it's not hard to see why because theoretically, all females should be feminists because the basic underlying idea of feminism is that women can do anything men can do. At the same time, however, I think that one day if I were to get married and have a family, I wouldn't mind (I might even want) being a housewife and homemaker. This is kind of a contradiction but this is the viewpoint from which I read and evaluate the lives of characters such as Edna, Nora, Mariam, and Laila.

So in my mind, the perfect marital relationship would be the husband and wife in a loving, caring relationship. There isn't anything that they wouldn't do for one another. The characters I previously listed do not have this, they are far from it. Nora is probably the closest to it because atleast she had several illegal actions that were "out of love" also her husband did tell her several times that he loved her. Mariam and Laila are actually in an abusive marriage where there husband is actually beating them and on the verge of killing them. And Edna is somewhere inbetween but more towards the side where Nora is.

So it's hard to judge Mariam and Laila because they were actually in a life or death situation. They were actually at a place where they couldn't leave because the Taliban would find them and beat them if they tried to leave and then Rasheed would beat them even more when they came home. Both of them also do not have a family to turn to because in Mariam's case, she is far from her homeland where she would have relatives and Laila's parents were killed. So I can understand when someone says that there was literally nothing that could be done.

This can be compared to what Edna did. She kills herself because it's "the only way out." This is simply not the case when you compare it to A Thousand Splendid Suns. Mariam and Laila could have killed themselves but they didn't. Maybe this is because they loved their children more than Edna did hers, or they realized the value of life because they were in a war zone and they both lost their parents. I don't have children but in my mind, I think that parents in real life, especially mothers, would love their children more like Laila and less like Edna or Nora. Anyway, out of the three pieces that we read, I think that A Thousand Splendid Suns would have made the most sense for the heroines to have killed themselves or left but it was the only one that didn't. Okay actually Mariam is killed and I thought that that was kind of stupid because I would have wanted her to run away with everyone else but she did kill her husband so she actually committed a crime that is punishable by death plus A Thousand Splendid Suns isn't a feminist novel and her motives were in the right place, she was sacrificing herself for people she loved.

So after reading a book like A Thousand Splendid Suns, where the protagonists are in such bad situations but still manage to rise and succeed, why do we consider Nora and especially Edna to be so great? Both of them give up on the lives they lead and it's not in the place of others. The fact that Laila can succeed in a Taliban infested Afganistan should shame them due to the fact that they "can't succeed" in the early 1900s America or 1870s Norway where women weren't prevented from so much as leaving their houses without a male relative. Of course, Nora, Edna, and Mariam and Laila are all living in completely different worlds. But it seems like if A Thousand Splendid Suns had ended the way The Awakening had ended, Laila would have been lying there getting beat up by Rasheed and slowly lost consiousness until "the musky odor of pinks filled the air" or maybe all Tariq wanted was a wife so she would have let the Taliban take care of her. Or if Laila had been Nora, A Doll House would have ended with Nora and her children leaving. And if Edna had been Nora, she would have just left to make a new life for herself rather than committing suicide.

So had each of these books taken place in America today, the only one that would remain the same is A Doll's House unless Nora and Trovald had decided to get marriage counciling and everything became okay, but really out of the three novels they are the ones with the best relationship. Edna would have abandonned her family and gotten a job or she would have been perscribed anti-depressants, or she never would have married Leonce in the first place because it's not like she loved him. And maybe Mariam and Laila would be like the Mormans. But they would have pressed charges against Rasheed or ran away with the children and of course they would of had the option of never having to have married him in the first place. Which they both did have in the book, but they didn't forsee the consequences.

There are examples of these situations in the world today. Begining with A Doll House, you could look at a sub-plot on the show Gilmore Girls. When Sherry leaves Christopher and daughter Gigi, it's because she's a strong independent woman and she wants to further her career even thought that means abandoning her family. When it's the other way around, a man leaving a woman and child the way Christopher left Lorelai and Rory (even though he was sixteen) the person leaving is the bad guy, he's abandoning what is his responsibility to pursue sonething else. Even though it's not exactly feminism, it's pretty screwed up if a woman leaving a man and child is uplifted because she doesn't want to be a mother and has her own aspirations, wheras a man leaving a woman and child is looked down upon because he's not taking care of his responsibility. Would we even have read A Doll House if Torvald had been the one who left in the end? The same applies to The Awakening. Would Nora or Edna have embraced their roles as mothers at the disappearance of their husbands?