Friday, December 4, 2009
Gender and Shame
Throughout Rushdi’s novel, Shame, there are many ties between gender and shame. On page 81, the woman’s ability to create life and give birth is made into something shameful when “an umbilical cord wound itself around a baby's neck and was transformed into a hangman's noose (in which other nooses are prefigured), into the breath-stopping silken rumal of Thug; and an infant came into the world handicapped by the irreversible misfortune of being dead before he was born.” By referring to the umbilical cord as a noose, it makes childbirth seem shameful because of the horrible things that can go wrong with it.
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I do remember. Also, in Chungtai's The Crooked Line presents birth/menstruation as something dirty and (shameful?) too. The symbol of the getting pregnant with the snake as a baby is one of them. The protagonist's first few experiences with birth are also traumatic, ex. eating dirt, defecating a snake and freaking out.
ReplyDeleteI do find it a juxtaposition with the first image we have of childbirth in the novel, which is painless and effortless (her mother was using a pumice stone while in labor).
I wonder what we can say more about her possible pregnancy a the end, after having accidentally killed an infant herself earlier.
God, this novel is complicated!!! I will definitely reread during our break.