Gender Prejudices and Discrimination in American Literature - Essay Example

A brief survey of the female characters in early American fiction can serve as a background to the picture of womanhood today in American society. Mark Twain never looked at his wife as an equal in his life. His attitude to womanhood can be traced through his female characters. Miss Watson can be taken here as an example. She is shown in Huckleberry Finn as a lonely woman living with her widowed sister, a societal outcast living in the shadow of others. Her presence only makes others uncomfortable, including Huck and Jim. An unmarried woman in Twain’s days got the role of a caretaker and as she stayed at home, she was expected to take care of sick or elderly relatives. She must be selfless and must devote her life to others. Twain depicts Miss Watson as a typical old maid of his time from which the prejudices and discrimination towards women in his society can easily be studied by the readers.

William Faulkner, on the other hand, depicts the actual situation of a woman and creates repulsion in the readers to the prevailing prejudices and discrimination. In A Rose for Emily, society’s points of view towards a confined woman are shown by the narrator. To what extent such an unfair situation can cause psychological damage to a woman is beautifully expressed in the story. Her father controls her thoughts and life and she is released from torture only when her father dies. Like Ibsen, Faulkner also shows that every woman during those days was living in a doll’s house.

In Scarlet Letter Hawthorne gives not only the dark reality of the prejudices and discriminations against women but also exposes the snobbishness in society regarding sexual matters. A priest seduces a woman, does not own up to his role and responsibility, and, he continues to preach from the pulpit. However, Hawthorne turns his female character charged with adultery into an angel through her stern commitment and devotion. The signs of resistance and determination to establish true womanhood are seen in his novel. All these honest intentions could not find the result in the twentieth century as a result of wars and depressions. Hemingway’s novels reveal such situations in which women are seen as mere objects of pleasure. Prostitution becomes rampant as the soldiers fighting on the borders were to be supplied with female flesh. How the male characters become incapable of extending emotions of love toward women is a common theme in his novels. When sex is seen as synonymous with pleasure the focus becomes the woman’s body and not the person. Lust replaces love. Henry Millers' novels can be taken as an example of this. They carry endless images of women as cunt, whore, and bitch. The difference between the sexual intercourses in Miller’s pages and the pages of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover reveals the actual differences between lust and love.

By the middle of the twentieth century, after the sixties to be precise, women writers came to the forefront as the custodians of true female experiences. Two women writers, Erica Jong and Tony Morison are taken here to show the changes seen in the literature regarding the depiction of prejudices and discrimination towards women. In Fear of Flying Isadora becomes a writer who feels she has overpowered all imposed ideologies on sex in her society. Her mother, who claims to have a bohemian outlook, refuses to talk about sex to her daughters. Sex was always meant to be suppressed both physically as well as a topic for conversation. She moves from this orthodox attitude to being a free writer, like her author, to give expressions to female impulses. She also realizes that there cannot anymore be any accidental conception, and the decision to conceive the child is only possible only when the woman is ready for it. In Morison, reclaiming selfhood, womanhood, is linked to the idea of reclaiming the racial self. Discrimination and alienation are the fate of a black woman. Therefore, any discussion of prejudice and discrimination in American literature cannot be done without looking into the works of writers like Langston Hughes or Morison.

Gender inequality and discrimination should not be tolerated, though brutality is inherent. Instead of looking towards the past, woman writers should try to develop true consciousness in society capable of evolving a culture in which decent human life is possible. As Erica Jong realizes “Like any underclass, women are denied not only the right to parity in arts but the right to their subject matter” (Jong, 196). To what extent it is possible to establish a sense of gender equality in this modern capitalistic society is a million-dollar question, because everything including womanhood is subject to the manipulations of money and profit.