Friday, October 16, 2009
Saira's Soul-Sucking Social Maneuvers
What do you guys think about Aunt Saira's attitude towards love throughout Hosain's "Sunlight"? As a matter of fact, her value system seems incredibly harsh to me. Consider page 134 when Laila is defending the girl at her school to Saira and her peers: "The word 'love' was like a bomb thrown at them." I found this to be particularly striking considering that the girls getting married in our other novels all seem to have had romantic fantasies about love - at least before their marriage. These women completely lack the sentimentality of women who are younger and/or of a lower class. It would seem that this tenderness has been rendered obsolete by the devising, political motives of Saira's desire for wealth and power. Yet, despite Saira's obvious propensity for power and influence, she shows her limited knowledge of world affairs on page 178 when she confuses Saleem's "I am no Lenin and can establish no Soviets" with "Linen serviettes," a clear indication that Saira thinks more about cloth and servants than the lives of people outside of her immediate social sphere. Her ideas about love resurface on page 180 as Saleem recounts his response to Saira asking him to marry Laila, "Mother, I don't love the girl." Saira immediately reacts "in a very superior, shocked manner, eyebrows lifted, nostrils quivering, 'Love? No one in decent families talks of love'." I think that Saira represents a very specific model of ideal womanhood: that of the aspiring, socially prominent, upper-class housewife. Perhaps Hosain is using Saira to demonstrate the hollow depravity of a life without love for other humans, when marriages are arranged according to proper breeding, guest lists are calculated, friendships are circumstantial, and children are born merely for the sake of maintaining a progeny to manage your estate when you die.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That's a great point -- but you might also consider why the novel needs her as a foil to the "real" romance plot (i.e. there's no tension without Saira or Hamid). Another way to put it: this class which is so cavalier about marriage (purely for economic and political gain) is also holding on to religious ideas as a way to critique their social superiors (the British, the decadent sections of the aristocracy, etc.). So for them, it's a package deal: you have to take all of the religious ideas about romance together, because if you give them up, then you have to accept your inevitable (and therefore permanent) social inferiority.
ReplyDelete