One thing I want to say about the book, and this is the early childhood and adolescent part, is whether or not Chunghtai believed that gender is conditioned by societal customs rather than genetically programmed. Females are inducted into womanhood through training and adhering to conventions of womanhood and males, perhaps the same way?
So what are the implications for portraying Shaman as an anomaly? a sort of wild child who resists the conventions?
I thought about her thinking that women give birth to snakes and her reaction to children's deaths. Maybe they are connected, may be not. I have to look into this when I finished the novel.
By presenting her as an anomaly early in her childhood, Chughtai is foreshadowing the difficulties Shaman will face later in her life. Although Shaman recognizes the hardships of other women throughout the novel, her own struggles are unique to her non-conformist (dare I say progressive?) lifestyle. While traditionally women are stifled by social norms within their own homes, Chughtai uses Shaman's character to show that the isolation associated with being a non-married, educated Muslim woman is a trial in itself. By resisting conventions, women face new problems. A traditional woman might at least have the other women in her household acting as a support network, whereas a woman like Shaman must face most of her problems alone.
ReplyDeleteI think, in addition to it being a foreshadowing of future difficulties, that it is a way for Chughtai to set up a contrast between Shaman's early life and her adulthood. It gives her coming of age a uniqueness because of the twist that completely readjusts Shaman from being this high-strung child to a functional young adult who can make friends and ultimately become an educated woman. Her childhood seems to set the stage in this bildungsroman, because it provides a high-stress environment of Shaman's family where she could not function which starkly contrasts to the environment she is surrounded by in her education where she learns who she is and begins to gain agency in forming her identity.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to challenge the idea that Shaman is an anomaly. We have Alma and before her we have the schoolteacher that Shaman is drawn to and we also have a variety of friends that Shaman meets who are also rebellious (many of them, in fact, more rebellious than Shaman when she's older). The nature of the Bildungsroman, though, requires us to inhabit the worldview of a single character and so it can distort our ability to make claims about larger classes (all women or all Muslims, for instance). The only way that you can go from the particular to the general is by accepting something simultaneously unique and typical (or rather, unique because typical, as contradictory as that sounds) about the central character. It's not entirely logical -- but that's part of the reason that it works as a novel and not as a sociological tract.
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