Trevor Durbin
Mrs. Rutan
A.P. Literature and Composition
27 January 2017
A Part of Him
Gender roles are one of the most harmful social constructs in today's society. Gender roles are sets of specific traits that someone is expected to have just because of their gender. Gender roles are fundamentally harmful to people as they often restrict or conflict with a person's individual personality. This is a great article that explains gender roles and how they are created and changed by our society, as well as the effects gender roles have on us as people. Many pieces of literature explore the idea of gender roles. Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House argue a very grim point about gender roles.
Gender roles degrade a person's humanity and cause them to be treated as nothing but property or an animal.
Atwood's dystopian society paints the picture of a world where women are separated into specific gender roles that reflect gender roles we have in today's society. Women in The Handmaid's Tale have duties to fulfill such as a wife/mother or maid that correlate to gender roles in the present day. These duties degrade women down to nothing but the role that they fulfill. An extreme example of this is the handmaids. The handmaids have the role of bearing children, taking an act that is supposed to allow humanity to flourish through creating life and turning it into a systematic process. This idea is clearly explained by the name used for the process, "... not making love, because this is not what he's doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved." (Atwood, 94). This is among the worst dehumanization possible, treating a human being as nothing but a birth vessel forced to produce the next generation for the government.
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Names. Are. Important.
Names can be an indicator of your role as a person. In The Handmaid's Tale, the main character's name is Offred because handmaids have names based upon the commanders they serve as a handmaid. Even the names given to handmaids are dehumanizing, as their names indicated that they are nothing beyond an extension or tool for the commander. Offred explains how her name is still important to her and her individual identity saying that she tells herself "...it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter." (Atwood, 84). Offred knows that her name is a part of her personal identity that has been taken away by the forced use of assigned handmaid names.
In A Doll's House, Ibsen focuses on the gender roles within marriage. Ibsen shows the far end of spectrum when it comes to marriage, showing that Torvald is clearly the dominant one. Traditionally, marriages were often male dominant with the man working and the woman staying at home. However, this is not always the case--especially in today's world. This article explains how marriage roles have moved away from tradition over time. Ibsen clearly shows that Torvald is the head of the household who makes all of the decisions, while Nora's purpose is for nothing but appearances. Torvald believes that her most important duties are "your duties to your husband and your children" (Ibsen, 1150). Torvald believes her only duty in life is to fulfill the gender roles of a wife and mother, and nothing more. He believes that she is some "blind, inexperienced creature" (Ibsen, 1150) who will never amount to anything more than the gender roles he forces upon her. For all her life, Nora was just passed along as a plaything from her father to Torvald. She points out that they "...only thought it was fun to be in love with [her]." (Ibsen, 1149). Nora was not a wife to Torvald, just a doll to play with.
Ibsen shows literal dehumanization by all of the names that are given to Nora by Torvald. Most of the time Torvald addresses Nora it's not by her name, but by pet names such as squirrel, songbird (Ibsen, 1095), and other names to represent small, dumb animals. Ibsen shows the dominance in the relationship purely by the names they are referenced by. Torvald is always referenced by Helmer (their last name) to show that he IS the family. Nora is referenced as Nora because she is just part of the family--just an extension of him and nothing more.
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These two pieces of literature clearly show the dehumanization that gender roles can cause to someone, however, they do it in very different ways. The Handmaid's Tale shows the dehumanization that comes when gender roles are their specific roles in society, treating them more like tools than people. A Doll's House shows how dehumanizing it is for a person to be treated like a doll, not having any duties but to act like they belong to someone else. These two pieces excellently show just how harmful gender roles can be and how they can easily drive us apart.