126332054 Full.Pdf
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COPING WITH WOMEN’S OBJECTIFICATION AN ANALYSIS TOWARD ISABEL ALLENDE’S EVA LUNA
A THESIS
Presented as a Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements to Obtain the Magister Humaniora (M.Hum) Degree in English Language Studies
By Elisabeth Natalina Huwa
Student Number: 126332054
THE GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDIES SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2017 PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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Presented by Elisabeth Natatina Uuwa Student Numben 126332054
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LEMBAR PERNYATAAN PERSETUJUAN PUBLIKASI KARYA ILMIAH UNTUK KEPENTINGAN AKADEMIS
Yang bertanda tangan di bawah ini, saya mahasiswa Universitas Sanata Dharma :
Nama : Elisabeth Natalina Huwa Nomor Mahasiswa :126332054
Demi pengembangan ilmu pengetahuan, saya memberikan kepada Perpustakaan Universitas Sanata Dharma karya ilmiah saya yang berjudul :
COPING WITII WOMEN OBJECTIFICATION AN ANALYSIS TOWARD ISABEL ALLENDE'S EVA LUNA
beserta perangkat yang diperlukan. Dengan demikian saya memberikan kepada Perpustakaan Universitas Sanata Dhanna hak untuk menyimpan, mengalihkan dalam bentuk media lain, mengelolanya dalam bentuk pangkalan data, mendistribusikan secara terbatas, dan mempublikasikannya di Intemet atau media lain untuk kepentingan akadernis tanpa perlu meminta ijin dari saya maupun mernberikan royalti kepada saya selama tetap mencantumkan nilma saya sebagai penulis.
Dernikian pemyataan ini yang saya buat dengan sebenarnya.
Dibuat di Yogyakarta
Pada tanggal : 26 Juli 2017
griruu"ft('u-atiru Huwa PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank for the accomplishment of this thesis writing. First of all, I should mention my thesis advisor, Paulus Sarwoto, Ph.D, who has provided guidance during the writing process. I also would like to mention Dr. Novita Dewi, Ph.D., Th. Enny Anggraini, Ph.D., and Sri Mulyani Ph.D., thank you for providing valuable critics and suggestion to the study. My gratitude also goes to Dr. Gregorius Budi Subanar, SJ and P. Mutiara Andalas, SJ., S.S., M.A., Ph.D., for the encouragement during the injury time. I would also like to thank to my family, especially my parents, for always providing me big support. I should mention my beloved friends Sri Haryatmi, Diksita Galuh Nirwinastu, Mia Asmiarsi, Yeni Kristanti, Theresia Kushardini, Cecilia Setyorini, and all of KBI students Batch 2012 for our friendships and every precious moment during the class.
Elisabeth Natalina Huwa
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1. Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE...... i APPROVAL PAGE...... ii DEFENSE APPROVAL PAGE ...... iii STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY...... iv LEMBAR PERNYATAAN PERSETUJUAN PUBLIKASI KARYA ILMIAH UNTUK KEPENTINGAN AKADEMIS ...... v ACKNOWLEGEMENTS...... vi TABLE OF CONTENT...... vii ABSTRACT...... viii ABSTRAK...... ix
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION...... 1 A. Background of the Study ...... 1 B. Research Questions...... 6 C. Scope of the Study ...... 6 D. Research Benefits...... 7 E. Chapter Outline...... 7 CHAPTER II. LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 9 A. Review of Related Study ...... 9 B. Review of Theoretical Concept ...... 13 C. Theoretical Framework...... 34 CHAPTER III. THREE FACES OF WOMEN’S OBJECTIFICATION ...... 36 A. Dehumanization; Slavery...... 36 B. Derivatization; Women’s inferiority...... 45 C. Casual Indifference; Ignorance ...... 53 CHAPTER IV. COPING WITH OBJECTIFICATION ...... 59 A. Self-discovery, internal and external factors ...... 61 B. Silence resistance, emerging interconnectedness ...... 67 C. Re-narrating women’s identity ...... 73 CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION...... 83 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 89
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ABSTRACT
Elisabeth Natalina Huwa (2017). Coping with Women’s Objectification; An Analysis toward Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna. Yogyakarta: Magister Kajian Bahasa Inggris. Program Pasca Sarjana, Universitas Sanata Dharma.
This study examines the manifestations of women’s objectification on Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna and the alternative ways to cope with it. Applying Nussbaum’s Objectification theory and Rector’s Objectification Spectrum, this study discusses about the women’s objectification as basis of women’s oppression There are three manifestations of objectification identified in Eva Luna. The first is slavery which is rooted in the ideas of ownership, denial of autonomy and instrumentality. The second is men’s superiority followed by women’s inferiority which is rooted in denial of autonomy. The third is ignorance performed by religious institution which is rooted in denial of subjectivity. This research provides three alternatives to cope with women’s objectification based on evidences in the novel. The first is women’s self-discovery aligned with the process of identity construction which includes internal and external elements. This self- discovery occurs through looking over all experiences, interpreting them, and giving them meaning. The second is silent resistance. It is a creative effort to elevate women’s potential capacity to unshackle oppressive restraints toward them. The third, re-narrating identity. It emphasizes how women construct identity as a Subject, an autonomous being, using their own narrative. However, reality is not as simple as a story. Dealing with women’s objectification in patriarchal situation is such a long winding journey. Objectification seems hard to be defeated. Women need to continue resisting undesirable situation to survive. Hopefully, it will help us to understand how women define who they are in their totality. It is also expected that the study can promote equal relationship between man and women.
Key words: Oppression, Patriarchy, Objectification, Women’s objectification, Sexual- objectification
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ABSTRAK
Elisabeth Natalina Huwa (2017). Coping with Women’s Objectification; An Analysis toward Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna. Yogyakarta: Magister Kajian Bahasa Inggris. Program Pasca Sarjana, Universitas Sanata Dharma.
Penelitian ini berupaya melihat bagaimana obyektifikasi terhadap perempuan tercermin dalam novel Isabel Allende, Eva Luna serta alternative cara untuk mengatasinya. Dengan menggunakan teori Obyektifikasi dari Nussbaum dan Spektrum Obyektfikasi dari Rector, studi ini membahas obyektifikasi sebagai basis opresi terhadap perempuan. Ada tiga manifestasi obyektifikasi perempuan yang ditemukan dalam Eva Luna. Pertama, perbudakan yang berakar dari gagasan tentang ownership (kepemilikan), denial of autonomy (penyangkalan atas otonomi), dan instrumentality (instrumentalisasi). Kedua, superioritas laki-laki yang diikuti oleh inferioritas perempuan yang berakar pada denial of autonomy (penyangkalan terhadap otonomi). Ketiga, pembiaran atau pengabaian yang dilakukan oleh institusi agama yang berakar pada denial of subjectivity (penyangkalan atas subyektifitas). Penelitian ini juga menampilkan tiga alternative untuk mengatasi obyektifikasi berdasar bukti-bukti yang disajikan dalam novel. Pertama, self-discovery (penemuan jati diri) yang sejalan dengan proses pembentukan identitas; didalamnya memuat unsur-unsur eksternal dan internal. Hal ini terjadi dengan cara melihat kembali pengalaman- pengalaman perempuan, menginterpretasikan dan memberi makna pada pengalaman- pengalaman tersebut. Kedua, silent resistance (perlawanan sunyi). Ini merupakan usaha kreatif perempuan untuk menguatkan kapasitas potensialnya dalam membebaskan diri dari belenggu opresi. Ketiga, re-narrating identity (menarasikan ulang identitas). Hal ini menekankan bagaimana melalu narasi perempuan membentuk identitasnya sebagai Subyek, entitas yang otonom. Realitas tidak sesederhana kisah dalam dongeng. Berhadapan dengan obyektifikasi terhadap perempuan dalam situasi patriarkis adalah perjalanan yang panjang dan berliku. Obyektifikasi terhadap perempuan tampaknya sulit dihapuskan. Perempuan harus terus melakukan perlawanan untuk dapat bertahan. Pada akhirnya, diharapkan membantu kita memahami bagaimana perempuan mendefinisikan dirinya secara total, mengetahui apa yang layak mereka capai serta cara mencapainya.
Kata kunci: Oppression, Patriarchy, Objectification, Women’s objectification, Sexual- objectification
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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
Isabel Allende Liona1 is a Chilean woman writer and one of the most famous Latin American novelists. More than ten books of Allende have been published and translated from Spanish into more than 25 languages within the last
28 years (1985 – 2017). Eleven of her oeuvre are published in English version such as The House of the Spirits (1985), Of Love and Shadow (1987), Eva Luna
(1988), The Story of Eva Luna (1991), The Infinite Plan (1993), Aphrodite (1998), and Daughter of Fortune (1999). She is the daughter of Chilean diplomat, Tomas
Allende Pesce de Bilbaire. Her first four novels are written during her exile in
Venezuela. Some articles mention that much of the action in her books is connected to her personal experiences of living in several different countries, especially after Chile’s political turmoil.2 She fled from her own country because of political pressure following a military coup which had taken one of the members of the family, the President of Chile, Salvador Allende.
Chile, or officially is the Republic of Chile, is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow strip of land between the Andes Mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. The country, as mostly countries in Latin
America, has a form of postcolonial relationship with Europe and particularly in
1 Tim McNeese, The Great Hispanic Heritage: Isabel Allende (New York: Chelsea House, 2006) 97. 2 John L. Rector, The History of Chile, (NewYork: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) 185-188. In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet brought down Chilean President Salvador Allende and set up a 16- year long military dictatorship (1973–1990). More than 3,000 people dead or missing during the time.
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relation to the colonial power of Spain.3 Prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the
16th century, northern and central Chile was under Inca rule while independent
Mapuche inhabited south-central Chile. Chile declared its independence from
Spain on 12 February 1818. Like some other Latin American countries, the majority of the people still challenge the problem of economic and political problems, as stated by Allende:
The first, the most naked and visible form of violence is the extreme poverty of the majority, in contrast with the extreme wealth of the very few…In Latin America we all survive on the borderline of those realities. Our fragile democracies exist as long as they don’t interfere with imperialist interests.4
Latin Americas economic, political and social crisis are historically inherited from the colonization of Spaniard. For women in poverty, life is even harder. Without bargaining power, they are potentially victimized by economic exploitation. Those who powerless therefore is prone to oppression. Women from poor groups are exploited and oppressed by people in power. This kind of situation is also presented in her novels including Eva Luna, a novel analysed in this research.
Eva Luna5 is originally written in Spanish and published in 1987. The novel used in this study is the English version translated by Margareth Sayer
Peden and published in 1988. The story is divided into eleven chapters spanning on several episodes of women predicaments. It is a continuum of phases ranging from Eva’s mother childhood who was adopted by the Mission to servanthood of
3 Marilyn Grace Miller, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America, (Austin: University of Texas Press: 2004) 3. 4 Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, eds. “Feminism in Literature,” A Gale Critical Companion 5 (2005) : 41-42. 5 Isabel Allende, Eva Luna, trans. Margareth Sayer Peden (London: Penguin Books, 1988). For future reference all citation from this novel will use initial EL with pagination only.
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both Eva and her mother, to educated young Eva and eventually to a talented scriptwriter of telenovela. Eva Luna portrays a journey of the eponymous character, a tough and resilient gifted-storyteller, who tries to survive amid oppressive and hegemonic patriarchal circumstances. Elizabeth M. Sorelle6 assures that the character of Eva Luna can only be a Caribbean and the setting of the novel is Venezuela with the portrayal of several dictatorships, geographic descriptions, guerrilla warfare and the fight against it. Through Eva Luna, Allende invents the story and at the same time reveals some parts of history of the
Caribbean countries.
Many critics claim that Allende’s works are influenced by Gabriel García
Márquez. There is similarity between Márquez and Allende. They encounter repressively political situation related to political tragedy of their country at certain time in life. Both authors intertwine historical references and imagination using magical realism in their novels. Magical realism7 is a term introduced in the
1940s which refers to narrative art that presents extraordinary occurrences as an ordinary part of everyday reality. The word ‘magic’ in magical realism appears through the extraordinary occurrence by rational science including ghost, disappearance, miracle, extraordinary talent and strange atmosphere. Realism in magical realism refers to truth that can be discovered by the individual through sense. The outer truth is real in which our senses give us a true report of it. As long as our senses can smell, touch, feel, or seize, the events can be categorized as truth.
6 Elizabeth M. Sorelle, A Feminist Analysis of the Narrative Structure of Isable Allende’s The Infinite Plan, Unpublished Thesis (Texas: Texas Tech University, 1996) 7 Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism, (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) 127.
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Márquez and Allende’s works are considered as a form of resistant literature. They also present strong females characters carrying out the real power behind the facade of authority. However, there is dissimilarity in accentuating the women characters in both authors’ works, as stated by Gingerich:
In García Márquez’s novel, however, the women are solid, sensible, feet-on-the-earth characters who hold the family together. Despite García Márquez’s protest to the contrary, this values are the values of a patriarchal society. Allende’s female characters are not limited to those values. Full of imagination, her heroin are also assigned the responsibility to write to create, or to change history whenever necessary. Allende female characters look to fulfil themselves as full human beings, not just as women.8
Gingerich sees that Allende’s female leading characters are more active and autonomous. Allende provides depiction that men and women roles are interchangeable: “female characters can be active, male characters can be passive”.9 It provides women perspective to see Spanish American challenging patriarchal system, as stated by Catherine R. Perricone:
Far from being proscribed by the patriarchal system with its insistence on masculine superiority, Spanish American literature has flourished, particularly among contemporary women writers who have not only been unafraid to seize the presumed instrument of men, the Logos, but have bravely confronted the system through images of those who have had power over them.10
Allende’s characters usually are female who have great inner strength and spirits in dealing with cultural constraints under patriarchal circumstances. S.E. de
Carvalho sees most notably Allende’s women characters are “come of age as a
8 Alina Camacho-Gingerich, “In Search of the Feminin Voice: Feminist Discourse in Contemporary Latin American Literature” St. Jones Law Review, 69 (1-2) (1995) : 35. 9 Ibid, 35. 10 Catherine R. Perricone, “Allende and Valenzuela: Dissecting the Patriarchy in Spanish American Fiction in the 1990s” South Atlantic Review 67 (4) (Autumn, 2002) : 81.
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woman, as a writer, as an independent adult forging her own path, and as a socially-responsible and politically-aware Latin American”.11
Alina Camacho-Gingerich sees Allende’s leading characters usually embody rebellion and eccentricity of the heroine, which generally do not apt to traditional frame. Eva, the leading character, lives most her life as a servant and surrounded by many characters who live in the margins of society as one who has rebelled and struggled against the status quo:
Marginals are people who stand unsheltered by the system, who somehow defy authority, defy the stereotypes. These people can be prostitutes, poor people, crazy people, guerrillas, homosexuals… And I’m always fascinated by those characters because in a way I think I’ve always defied authority too.12
Gingerich states that Allende “does not pretend to faithfully reproduce
Latin-America of Chilean reality and history”13 in her novels as “the narrative discourse” which generates an image of textual reality displacing extra-textually social or historical reality.14 Gingerich argues that Allende’s imagination represents Latin American history and reality especially in her own country,
Chile. Related to Gingerich statement, Stephen M. Hart states that through Eva
Luna, Allende shows a “critical awareness of anti-hegemonic potential as a means to question the official version of history or memory or to criticize class, gender, and race divisions”.15
11 S.E. de Carvalho, “Narration and Distance in Isabel Allende’s Novels and in Cuentos de Eva Luna”, Antipodas 6-7 (1994-1995): 55-62. 12 John Rodden, Interview. "‘The Responsibility to Tell You’: An Interview with Isabel Allende." The Kenyon Review, 13 (1) (1991) :118 13 Alina Camacho-Gingerich, “In Search of the Feminin Voice: Feminist Discourse in Contemporary Latin American Literature” St. Jones Law Review, 69 (1-2) (1995) : 31. 14 Ibid, 32. 15 Stephen M. Hart. “Eva Luna and Cuentos de Eva Luna”, Critical Guide to Spanish Texts. (2003) :106
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Perricone claims that Allende offers solution to women to deal with oppressive patriarchal system by providing alternative on how women should react differently towards it.16 In addition to the solution, Allende’s fiction embodies, contradicts, and transcends the patriarchal system through the characterization of Spanish American men. It results to a greater understanding of a culture in transition. By making connection from one event in the past to another in the present, Allende connects the traditional thought and the desirable future of women.
The fact that women are discriminated, alienated, or treated as second-class shows that there is imbalanced power relationship that put women in oppressive situation in different forms and levels. It is important to know the basis of the oppression to find ways to cope with it. The first objective of the research therefore is to explain how women’s objectification as basis of oppression manifests in Eva Luna. The second is to see how the novel provides alternative to deal with women objectification.
B. Research Question
1. How is women objectification depicted in Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna?
2. What kind of alternative ways to cope with women objectification does
Allende provide in the novel?
C. Scope of the Study
This thesis aims to examine how the women objectification manifests on the Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna. It also sees pathways of women to deal with
16 Catherine R. Perricone, “Allende and Valenzuela: Dissecting the Patriarchy in Spanish American Fiction in the 1990s” : 81. 84.
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objectification, following phases of women to survive and to cope with the oppressive situation. To achieve the objectives, this study combines objectification theory proposed by Nussbaum and Rector. By doing so, it is expected that this study provides the deep rooted causes of oppression and the women’s endurance due to the imbalanced power relation between women and men which places women in a disadvantaged situation. It explains about women’s creative negotiation with people in power to deal with oppressive situation.
D. Research Benefits
This study shows a long and winding journey of women dealing with patriarchy and oppression as the oppression continue to occur in many different way. It also explains the features of objectification. By identifying the features of objectification, this study expects that readers can be more aware of the symptoms of objectification happening in our surrounding.
This study also offers some alternatives to cope with women objectification based on evidences in the novel. Hopefully, it will help us to understand how women define who they are in their totality, what they deserve in life, and how they achieve it. Finally, this study is expected to be complementary research to understand how women oppression is seen in relation with another imbalanced relationship in society such as gender, race and class.
E. Chapter outline
This study is divided into 5 chapters. Chapter I presents background of the study. Chapter II provides theoretical basis and review of some previous studies on Allende’s works especially those related to Eva Luna.
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Chapter III displays a portrait of women amidst oppressive patriarchal society in the novel. It describes three different faces of women oppressions and underlines women objectification as basis of the oppression. It also will depict how different responses to objectification bring women to different consequences.
Chapter IV explains Allende’s offers to cope with women objectification. It observes journey of female protagonist and other characters towards self- discovery; how they interpret their experiences and perceive their subjectivities. It provides evidence on how women’s consciousness arises and how they cope with the oppression.
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CHAPTER II LITERATURE REVIEW
A. Review of Related Studies
One of previous studies on Eva Luna is written by Jacoba Koene entitled
Metaphors of Marginalization and silencing of woman in Eva Luna and Cuentos
De Eva Luna by Isabel Allende.17 The study focuses on the marginalization and silencing of women in the two of Allende’s works which include the repetition of the name; Eva Luna. Koene discovers that:
…a recurring theme in Allende’s writing is what many theorists have referred to as the set of binary, hierarchical oppositions that have structured Western thought, whereby woman is always placed on the side of negativity, lack, and emptiness.18
Koene also analyses the transformation of protagonist from a naïve young girl Eva into a woman writer by transforming power of language in story-telling into a written narrative. Eva Luna, Cuentos De Eva Luna, and A Thousand and
One Nights depict how the invented stories are able to influence the ideas and perspectives of listeners and how they become powerful means to suspend the forthcoming troubles in life. Through woman protagonist of the novel, Allende offers a message that “women must gain access to the power of the word in order to subvert, transform and eventually overcome the marginalization and silencing imposed on them by patriarchal society”.19
The notion of subversion in Allende’s novels is presented not only by the ability of the main characters to use language as silent resistance to patriarchal
17 Jacoba Koene, Metaphors of Marginalization and silencing of woman in Eva Luna and Cuentos De Eva Luna by Isabel Allende, Unpublished Dissertation, (Canada: University of Toronto, 1997) 18 Ibid, 221. 19 Ibid, iii.
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system but also by the narrative technique. One of which for instance is done by
Barbara Loach.20 Loach discovers that the way in which Allende shifts between first-and-third person narration and the way in which these shifts between these points of views result in a subversion of the traditional masculine mode of storytelling, and therefore also subvert the patriarchy. Loach sees the way Allende uses magical realism and humor as unique to her as Chilean writer.
The magical realism fictions are often written by the Chilean authors from the disempowered political and cultural perspective, including Allende. The way to use language and magical events conveys an implicit criticism of society, particularly the elite. It is not simply a way to follow the character of a particular genre or style of writing, but it can be used as an idea of resistance. Using the technique of magical realism, some writers with high political motivation have set their magical realism fiction in areas with highly political and social tension.
Another discussion about literary technique is provided by Zoila Clark in the Judaic Evil Myths in Latin American Women Writers.21 It examines two stories by Allende, Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna, featuring the return of mythical character Lillith with a feminist theme. Clark shows that the literary technique is used by Allende to remove maternal guilt from women. It also explains that the protagonist, Eva, is a picara who tells stories about women that challenge the boundaries of heterosexuality and marriage. Rather than being demonized, independent women who break free of convention are considered as malleable beings and are able to adapt the oppressive situation. Using memory, a
20 Barbara Loach, “The Discourse of Resistance in Power and Women’s Writting in Chile”, qtd in Britt Elizabeth Honeycutt, An Annotated Bibliography of Four Novels by Isabel Allende, 1982- 2007: The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadow, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, Unpublished Thesis, (Wilmington: University of North Carolina, 2009). 21 Zoila Clark, Judaic Evil Myths in Latin American Women Writers.1
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surreal space is created to rewrite the present and to recreate the feminine identity.
Clark learns that the idea of woman who rebels against patriarchal order that control her sexuality is opposed to the idea of individual who decides to live as an independent woman. Both of the ideas put women as a threat and a danger to divine order.
Allende describes patriarchal society by establishing feminist theme; exposing man's violence against women, and stating that male sexual behaviour is controlling, perverting, and destructing. Examining The Infinite Plan, Elizabeth
M. Sorelle suggests that the novel is a mirror in which tales are retold and female characters struggle against patriarchal oppression.22 Sorelle concludes that
Allende truly holds her intention of breaking the norms of patriarchal language by maintaining female omniscient narrator to control the novel and to undermine the traditional power of male protagonist and male narrator. These kinds of ideas obviously appear in Eva Luna.
A useful study of Honeycutt provides a record of various studies applied on first four Allende’s works; The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva
Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna.23 Several studies on the four novels are classified into different themes such as narrative technique and genre, narration and distance, similarities among Chilean women writers, and pattern of Allende’s novels.24 Honeycutt summarizes some overriding critics towards Eva Luna i.e. the use of Magical Realism genre as subversive voice to oppression, the use of
22 Elizabeth M. Sorelle, A Feminist Analysis of the Narrative Structure of Isabel Allende’s The Infinite Plan, 124. 23 Britt Elizabeth Honeycutt, An Annotated Bibliography of Four Novels by Isabel Allende, 1982- 2007: The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadow, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, Unpublished Thesis, (Wilmington: University of North Carolina, 2009) 24 ) Britt Elizabeth Honeycutt, An Annotated Bibliography of Four Novels by Isabel Allende, 1982- 2007: The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadow, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, 70.
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metafictional devices in postmodern novel, and the use of stories as a defence against a retreat from hostile environment. Honeycutt findings help us to develop wider discussion on Allende’s works by using different perspectives.
Allende’s works also provide representation of woman as a mother. Susan
Frenk states that “motherhood is a positive force in Allende’s novel, and provides a historical context by reviewing the significant role of mother in Chile’s history”.25 While Maureen Shea emphasizes that Allende texts “replete with maternal bounds”.26 When the natural mother and daughter relationships are not present, Allende “creates them through other characters who always contribute to the protagonist’s salvation”.27
A study conducted by Jeanine Luciano Costa entitled Remember Me:
Identity formation in Clarice Lispetor, Isabel Allende, and Michelle Cliff also concerns the issue of mother-daughter relationship.28 Costa sees that relationship of Ines and Eva emerges in “the condition of life for many poor women [which] demand a fighting spirit for sheer physical survival” 29. Ines, the unmarried teacher who lives with strong endeavour, provides young girl Eva with education. This kind of mothering role sometimes is “able to give their daughters something to be valued far more highly than full-time mothering.”30
25 Susan Frenk, “The Wandering Text: Situating the Narrative of Isabel Allende” in Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, qtd in Britt Elizabeth Honeycutt, (2009), 73. 26 Maureen Shea. “Love, Eroticism, and Pornography in the work of Isabel Allende” Women’s Studies. 18 (1990): 223-231 qtd in Honeycutt, Britt Elizabeth. (2009) 79. 27 Ibid, 79 28 Jeanine Luciano Costa, Remember Me: Identity formation in Clarice Lispetor, Isabel Allende, and Michelle Cliff. Unpublished Dissertation, (Chapel Hill: Faculty of the University of North Carolina, 2006) 29 Adrienne Rich. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Tenth Anniversary Ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company: 1986) 247. 30 Jeanine Luciano Costa, Remember Me: Identity formation in Clarice Lispetor, Isabel Allende, and Michelle Cliff, 247.
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To understand Allende’s works, some studies mentioned above provide various discussions from different feminist themes such as silencing and marginalizing women (by Koene), disrupting the norms of patriarchal language
(by Sorelle), characterizing women identity formation (Costa), dissecting patriarchy (Perricone), using magical realism as subversive technique (Loach), and challenging boundaries of heterosexuality and marriage (Clark). The intersection of these studies is that they explain about women oppression and patriarchal system but argument about objectification as basis of the oppression is not sufficiently performed. Thus, women objectification theme is still worth a comprehensive discussion.
B. Review of Theoretical Concept
Women objectification can be seen as result of patriarchal structure and at the same time as a source which preserves the structure. To analyse the operation of women objectification, three interrelated main concepts need to be discussed in this study: oppression, patriarchy, and objectification. To elaborate concept of objectification, other concepts such as women objectification, sexual objectification, and women self-objectification are included.
1. Oppression
The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology defines a social oppression as “a concept that describes a relationship between groups or categories of people in which a dominant group benefits from the systematic abuse, exploitation, and
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injustice directed toward a subordinated group”.31 The word oppression refers to situation in which certain groups or individuals in society do not enjoy their rights to be in sufficiently political, economic, racial, sexual relationship due to systematic abuse, exploitation, or injustice. These oppression can be performed by dominant groups like bureaucrats, religious institution, police, military regime, or, by person such as the patrona (Spanish: masters), madrina (Spanish: godmother), husband, father, mother, etc.
Women experience oppressive situation due to imbalanced power relation.
This inequality leads into many faces of oppressions: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence.32 This oppression cannot be seen as a single entity of women-men problematic relationship. It is inseparable with, and at the same time a reflection of, unjust power relation occurring in the society. Thus, examining women oppression, we need to include related issues such as class, race, gender relation, within a system that potentially tolerate the oppression i.e. patriarchy and capitalism. Stephen
Feuchtwang emphasizes that analysing literary text and examining the condition of production in the society without class and race perspective will
“unintentionally reproduce the ideological values of mass-market romance”.33
Nancy Holmstrom states that speaking about women’s oppression and its injustice without addressing capitalism is not sufficient for diminishing women
31 A.G. Johnson, The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology: a user’s guide to sociological language 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publisher, 2000) 32 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990) 48-62. 33 Stephen Feuchtwang, Socialist Feminist and Anti-Racist Struggles, (1980), 41.
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oppression, it only “will be of little help in ending women’s oppression”.34
Holmstrom sees that “class as central to women lives”35 and that women oppression which is usually associated with male domination is not a product of patriarchal structure per se but related to capitalist modes of production. In relation with this idea, Deborah L. Madsen emphasizes that “social class structure is seen to be inseparable from gender division: just as the rich oppress the poor, so men oppress the women” and that this point of view represents not only female oppression but also the entire oppressive patriarchal power structure by “exposing
(as unnatural) relationship of male domination, especially in their relation to capitalist modes of production.”36
Madsen sees three canters of attention to analyse women oppression suggested by socialist feminist. Firstly, it concerns with roles of women who are independent of class status (mother, sister, housewife, mistress, and consumer) and the relation among them. Secondly, it scrutinizes ideological construction of femininity under patriarchal white supremacy. Thirdly, it examines power relationship between men and women within the family which reproduces power relationship that exist in society.
People under conquest who undergo physical and psychological oppression possibly will carry both personal and collective experience along their live and pass down their nature from generation to generation. This background consciously or unconsciously contributes to the definition and configuration of existing geopolitical aspects of a society. It plays a role in the formation of
34 Nancy Holmstrom, The Socialist Feminist Project, A contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics, Introcuction (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002) 2. 35 Ibid. 2. 36 Deborah L. Madsen, Feminist Theory and Literary Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2000) 186.
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cultural identity, social beliefs and ideologies. The story of conquest becomes significant to understand the nature of characters of the novel and how they interact to one another.
History of oppression always shows and inherits a picture of inequality between those who have power in the mode of production and those who are powerless or lacking of access to resources. Those who are powerless potentially are the sufferers, either women or men. However, in the society classed by gender, race, class, which is expressed in the daily life and in every element of social practices, women are prone to be those who voiceless, thus, powerless. Not only does the oppression occur in public area, it is repeated and duplicated in the smallest unit of society; a family. Mary Murray quoted from Firestone’s The
Dialectic of Sex (1979) states:
All past history …was the history of class struggle. These warring classes of society are always the product of mode of organization of the biological family unit for the reproduction of the species, as well as the exchange of goods and services. The sexual reproductive organization of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of economic, juridical and political institutions as well as the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period.37
The class then is not only a segregation based on imbalanced power relation between elite and bourgeois in society but also between master and servant, head of household and other members of family, and even husband and wife in domestic area. Thus, the struggle against oppression manifests both in public and domestic area. The oppression of women usually is a reflection of other oppressions in the society. Not only does it describe the power relationship
37 Mary Murray, The Law of the Father?: Patriarchy in the Transition from Feodalism to Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 1995) 20.
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between men and women but also among women in cultural, political and economic aspects of life. It is related to patriarchal structure in the society.
2. Objectification
Objectification can happen to anyone, regardless of sex, gender, age, race, and other aspects of human identity. It can be experienced by individual and group. Under patriarchal circumstances, women are prone to be objectified. The concept of objectification is first introduced by Immanuel Kant38 when he suggested that objectified people are seen as merely a means to an end, and denied their humanity. For Kant, the objectification involves the lowering of a person, a being with humanity, to the status of an object. As a being with humanity, people are capable of deciding what is valuable and capable of finding ways to realize and promote this value.
2.1. Martha C. Nussbaum’s Objectification theory
Martha C. Nussbaum39 provides seven features of objectification. She states that people are objectified when they are treated: (i) As tool for one’s own purposes (instrumentality), (ii) as lacking in autonomy and self-determination
(denial of authonomy), (iii) as lacking in agency and activity (inertness), (iv) as interchangeable with others of the same or different types (fungibility), (v) as permissible to break, smash, or break into (violability), (vi) as something that is owned by another (ownership), and/or (vii) as something whose experiences and
38 Imanuel Kant, “Lectures on Ethics”, 163. Qtd in Evangelia Papadaki, “Feminist Perspective on Objectification”, Web. CSLI, Stanford University Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095- 5054 39 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Objectification”. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24 (4) (1995) : 257.
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feelings do not need to be considered (denial of subjectivity). Nussbaum considers that the concepts are not only slippery, but also multiple:
Objectification is a relatively loose cluster term, for whose application we sometimes treat any one of these features as sufficient, though more often a plurality of features is present when the term is applied. …and that it is possible that "some features of objectification... may in fact in some circumstances...be even wonderful features of sexual life …the term objectification can also be used...in a more positive spirit..40
This quotation expresses that objectification cannot be only seen as negative or undesirable ideas and behaviours. It has features that may be either good or bad. To make it clear, Nussbaum provides a case of instrumentality as an example:
If I am lying around with my lover on the bed, and use his stomach as a pillow there seems to be nothing at all baneful about this, provided that I do so with his consent ...and without causing him pain, provided, as well, that I do so in the context of a relationship in which he is generally treated as more than pillow.41
Nussbaum highlights that “what is problematic is not instrumentalization per se, but treating someone primarily or merely as an instrument”42. There is possibility, depends on overall context, to perceive objectification as positive behaviour. It is negative when it takes place with the absence of equality, respect and consent. It is positive or benign when it is compatible with equality, respect, and consent.
Nussbaum explains that in the matter of objectification, context is relevant to judge whether or not treating people as an object is negative or destructive. “…I
40 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Objectification”. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24 (4) (1995) : 251. 41 Ibid, 265. 42 Ibid, 265
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shall argue that in many if not all cases, the difference between an objectionable and a benign use of objectification will be made by the overall context of the human relationship in question.”43 Even when two people reducing one another to their bodily parts seems quite wrong, to particular context, under deeply understanding and mutual respect between them, this kind of treatment is not harmful, thus, it can be considered as benign objectification.
One of dehumanization form is slavery. In Latin American context, women’s slavery placed women as capital assets. Susan M. Socolow44 provides clear depiction that women's slavery in Latin America has been viewed as legally inferior to indigenous population:
Slaves, in addition to their labour, were capital asset. Age and reproductive potential affected he value of female slave, for Iberian law the child of a female slave was also a slave….Black female servants, both slave and free, also worked as cook, laun- dresses, and prostitute. Indeed, prostitution was another occupation often associated with free and slave women of colour.45
Since the colonial period, under the European rule, the powerful hegemony of patriarchy over the poor indigenous people Indigenous women, the non-white, may only interact with the men in the same race which means with those of the same class. Even their children are slaves since they are born.
Women’s slavery entraps women in much dehumanized situation. As slave, women do not have any choice to make decision even for their own safety. Even when they can survive, they barely free themselves from vicious circle of another
43 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Objectification, 271. 44 Susan M. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 2nd ed, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 141. 45 Ibid, 142-143.
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life predicament; they are forced to prostitution to collect money until it’s enough to buy their freedom in the future. Socolow explains:
…using the widespread practice of day laborers, some master encouraged slave women to sell themselves. Others engaged in the world's oldest profession by their own volition, because selling sexual service was a profitable business. Earning from prostitution have even been suggested as the reason that so many urban female slaves were able to buy their own freedom.46
Socolow further explains that relationship with white or whiter men also conveyed a degree of prestige on the slave women while producing lighter- coloured offspring from the union. As slave women are far from their communities of origin and torn from their cultures. They are forced to re-create a new social and religious environment by accepting Hispanic forms while maintaining parts of their traditional heritage. Slavery no doubt weakened the importance of family ties for the first generation of slaves, although in later generations slave were able to construct new kinship ties.
As this study tries to examine objectification features as basis of oppression, the tone that the objectification is undesirable or harmful needs to be emphasized. In this case, Rector’s concept of objectification spectrum, which explains the misapprehension of what human beings are in their totality, is needed.
2.2. John M. Rector’s Spectrum of Misapprehension
Rector defines objectification as “a psychological process of seeing human beings more as Objects than as Subjects and treating them accordingly. Being objectified means to be made into and treated as an object that can be used,
46 Susan M. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 143.
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manipulated, controlled, and known through its physical properties”.47 Rectors divides objectification into 3 different levels or what so called 3 spectrum of misapprehension: casual indifference, derivatization, and dehumanization. They are in fact related to phenomena which stem from the same underlying process, the misapprehension of the entity of human beings. In other words, when a person objectifies others, he/she misperceives them as being less than what they are in their totality.48 Rector defines dehumanization as representation of a psychological process occurring in people’s mind which allows them to act in vicious way:
It is important to point out that in the mind of dehumanizer, the transformation of human beings into nonhumans and sub- humans is not a result of the dehumanizer having treated other persons violently. Rather, perceiving other people as subhuman can facilitate treating such individuals in brutal, degrading ways. 49
Dehumanization is an attitude, a way of perceiving of other people erroneously, an idea that enables people to behave brutally and sadistically.
Haslam proposes two kinds of dehumanization50. Firstly, when people are seen as lacking in civility, refinement, and socialized attributes (uniquely human traits), they are regarded as coarse, uncultured, and amoral; and those experience animalistic dehumanization. Secondly, when people undergo the denial of human nature traits, such as warmth, openness, and depth, they are perceived as cold,
47 John M. Rector, The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9. 48 Ibid, 9. 49 Ibid,33. 50 Nancy Haslam, “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review” in Sarah J. Gervais, Ed. Objectification and (De)Humanization; 60th Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 60, (New York: Springer, 2013), 78.
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rigid, and superficial which is consistent with likening to object or automata and they therefore experience mechanistic dehumanization.
This misapprehension serves some people or groups to see others more as
“physical objects divorced to varying degrees from their interior, spiritual dimension” rather than as “Subjects composed of a unified psyche and soma – worthy of respect, dignity and reference”.51 These perceptual errors are apparent to particular appearances. Seeing others as physical objects results on the way people treat others. The greater the perceptual error, the greater their potential to do violence to others.
At the mild form, objectification is typified by casual indifference. The manifestation can be a tendency to give “little affective connection between oneself and the most others (e.g. those outsides one’s immediate circle of family, friends, colleagues at work, etc.)” until “to block out, deny, or suppress the reality of monumental suffering” 52 undergoes by others. The word casual is meant to imply that at the low end of the spectrum, there is no intent to be cruel or to do actual harm to others, rather, its primary manifestation is non-action, or sins of omission. When a person has the capacity to do more good to others and that he/she has a chance to do that but not doing it, the person experiences the spectrum of misapprehension.
The vast midrange of the objectification spectrum is derivatization, the concept coined by Cahill (2011). Cahill states that “if ‘objectify’ means ‘to turn
51 Sarah J. Gervais, Ed. Objectification and (De)Humanization; 60th Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 60, (New York: Springer, 2013) 21. 52 John M. Rector, The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 25.
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into an object,’ then ‘derivatize’ means ‘to turn into a derivative’.53 She defines that:
To derivatize is to portray, render, understand, or approach a being solely or primarily as the reflection, projection, or expression of another beings identity, desires, fears, etc. The derivatized subject becomes reducible in all relevant ways to the derivatizing subject’s existence – other elements of derivatized subject is disregarded, ignore, or under-valued. Should derivatized subject dare to demonstrate aspects of her subjectivity that fall outside the derivatizer’s being…she will be perceive as arrogant, treasonous, and dangerously rebellious.
Cahill’s concepts of derivatization are considered as more accurate way of capturing the negative substance of objectification because it includes concept of inequality; the incorrectness of degrading others.
The extreme point of objectification manifestation is dehumanization which involves two central, related components: (1) the denial that they are not fully human; and (2) the affirmation that the individual or group is subhuman. It includes reducing, disregarding, ignoring, or under-valuing elements of human subjectivity of others.54 Rector explains further:
The process of dehumanization moves the intended targets both out of the realm of humanity and into the realm of something less than human. It is important to point out that in the mind of dehumanizer, the transformation of human beings into nonhumans and subhumans is not a result of the dehumanizer having treated other persons violently. Rather, perceiving other people as subhumans can facilitate treating such individuals in brutal, degrading ways. 55
The quotation shows us clear differences between dehumanization and derivatization. To derivatize a person is not to treat that person as non-human, or
53 John M. Rector, The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 27. 54 Ibid, 32. 55 Ibid, 33.
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as less-human, but rather to reduce the person to an aspect of another being. The harm part of derivatization is a failure to acknowledge ontological distinctive, but on the other hand dehumanization allows people to treat others inhumanly.
From the three definitions explained above, we can see that oppression and patriarchy cannot be separated in the sphere of women objectification discussion.
Women objectification can be seen as basis of women oppression and at the same time a product of patriarchal structure in society. The other related concepts need to be discussed are women objectification and sexual objectification.
3. Women Objectification and sexual objectification
The theory of women objectification is developed by Fredrickson and
Roberts (1997). It is basically a synthesis and formalization of many different researches on sexual objectification of women. It offers a focus and formal framework for “investigating the consequences of living in such a sexually objectifying cultural milieu that socializes girls and women to view and to treat themselves as objects to be evaluated on the basis of their appearance”.56
Women objectification is typically defined as a culture’s tendency to treat women’s bodies as objects rather than as active, autonomous entities. In this point, women objectification as a kernel of many faces of women oppression can also be seen as a result of patriarchal structure and at the same time as a source which preserves the structure. Women objectification cannot be separated from sexual objectification. Rector suggested a definition taken from Bartky (1990, p.26):
56 M. Rachel Calogero, “Objectification Theory; an Introduction” in M. Rachel Calogero ed. Self- Objectification in Women, Causes, Consequences, and Counteraction (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2011), 9.
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A person is sexually objectified [i.e., derivetized] when parts of sexual functions are separated out from the rest of her personality and reduced to the status of mere instruments or else regarded as if they were capable or representing her.57
Thus, seeing women’s particular body part and sexual function as representative of women subject can be considered as performing sexual objectification. Even though sexual objectification can happen to both men and women, under the patriarchal system, women are more vulnerable of being sexually objectified than men.
Fredrickson and Roberts argue that despite the heterogeneity among woman with regards to ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, and physical and personal attributes, “having a reproductively mature body may create a shared social experience, a vulnerability to sexual objectification which in turn may create a shared set of psychological experiences.”58 Sexual objectification leads to several psychological consequences such as body shame, appearance and safety anxiety, consuming mental energy, depression, etc.59
Sexual objectification cannot be easily dismissed since the practice of sexually objectifying woman occurs for long time in daily basis ubiquitously. It is acquainted in daily life to find women “stand continuously before men’s gaze, under men’s judgment” and live their body as seen by another, by an “anonymous patriarchal Other.”60 Not only does treating women as sexual object reduce their
57 John M. Rector John, The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 29. 58 Ibid, 9. 59 M. Rachel Calogero, Self-Objectification in Women, Causes, Consequences, and Counteraction), 11. 60 John M. Rector, The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 9.
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sexual function as part of their personality into merely instrument, but further, it also degrades their dignity and violates their subjectivity as human being.
4. Patriarchy
The word patriarchy refers to a society in which the oldest man is the leader of the family or refers to a society controlled by men who use their power for their own advantage. Avoiding the notion that every individual man is in a dominant position and every woman is in a subordinate one, Sylvia Walby defines patriarchy as “a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women”.61 In patriarchal society women undergo unjust and unequal situation like alienation, exclusion, or even violence merely due to a fact that they are women.
Patriarchy in Latin America cannot be separated from the history of Latin
American colonization. Latin American women have used any means to resist patriarchy throughout history. Women in the Caribbean struggle to survive in some restraints as second class based on their socially-structured realities as mullato,62 non-white and uneducated slave. Patriarchal society puts women in difficult situation to express and to gain their self-determination, to have the ability or power to make decision, and even to have courage to acknowledge their needs, desire and identity. It puts women’s role to be weaker than men in many areas. This kind of idea determines the gender division of labour both in domestic and public sphere. To differentiate the public and domestic sphere, Nancy
Chodorow explains:
61 Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford, Basil Blackwell Ltd.:1991) 20. 62 Mulata (female) or mullato (male) person who born of one white parent and one black parent. Mullatoes represent a significant part of the population of various Latin American and Caribbean countries.
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The domestic sphere is the sphere of the family. It is organized around mothers and children. Domestic ties are particularistic- based on specific relationships between members – and often intergenerational, and are assumed to be natural and biological. The public sphere is non-familial and extra-domestic. Public institutions, activities, and forms of association are defined and recruited normatively, according to the universalistic criteria in which the specific relationships among participants are not a factor.63
It shows that patriarchal society places women and children in the centre of domestic sphere. The public sphere forms “society” and “culture” – those intended, constructed forms and ideas that take humanity beyond nature and biology. And the public sphere, therefore “society” itself, is masculine. Class, gender, and racial are problematic issues that emerge from imbalanced power relation among individuals or groups. They intertwine within patriarchal circumstances place women in the most vulnerable position. Relationship between those who are economically powerful and those who are powerless will be discussed to understand how women in poverty fall into the objectification.
On the one hand, patriarchal structure tolerates men to control the resources in domestic and public domain. On the other hand, men gain power from this structure which gives them control power to maintain their authority over women’s life socially, politically and economically. Dictionary of Feminist
Theory defines patriarchy as:
…a system of male authority which oppresses women through its social, political and economic institutions. In any of the historical forms that patriarchal society takes, whether it is feudal, capitalist or socialist, a sex-gender system and a system of economic discrimination operate simultaneously. Patriarchy has power from men’s greater access to, and mediation of, the
63 Nancy Chodorow, “Mothering, Male Dominance, and Capitalism” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminist, Zillah R. Einstein ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 87-88
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resources and rewards of authority structures inside and outside the home.64
In patriarchal society, the existence of women is reduced to derivative of the existence of men. It seems that “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being”65 and that women are seen as the result of man’s imagination. Patriarchal society puts women in difficult situation to express, to acknowledge their needs, their desire, and even their identity. It is uneasy for women in this situation to make decision for themselves. They lack of self-determination.
One of the thoughts that preserves imbalanced point of view about women as human beings is derived from sexist idea that reduces women entity to only their sexuality. :
[…] thus she (woman) is called 'the sex', by which is meant that she appears essentially to male as sexual being. For him she is sex - absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute-she is the Other".66
The notion that women is less essential to men, or, that men is the Absolute and that women is the Other, is discussed within the concept of objectification. By being the Subject, the Absolute, men have a tendency to treat women, the Other, as non-autonomous entity. At this point, women’s subjectivity and autonomy tend to be denied. Women are treated as instrument as if “they lack of autonomy and
64 Maggie Hum, The Dictionary of Feminist Theory, 2nd (USA: Ohio State University Press, 1995) 200 65 Simone De Beauvoir. The Second Sex, Introduction, Trans. Ed. H.M.Parshley (London: Iowe and Bridone, 1956) 15. 66 Simone De Beauvoir, 15-16.
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self-determination”67 and eventually they may be treated as “something whose experiences and feelings need not be taken into account”68. These ways of treating women lead them into severe oppression which is indissoluble under the hegemony of patriarchal system.
Even though objectification can be endured by any people regardless of sex and gender, in patriarchal society women are objectified in their day-to-day environments, from the subtle to the blatant forms. Women undergo oppressive situation such as alienation, exclusion, or even violence merely due to a fact that they are women. These manifestations of oppression are rooted from a thought that women are inferior beings, as an object that less than men, and less than human.
5. Pathways toward transformation
As mentioned previously, women must gain power to deal with oppressive situation. Women should first understand and recognize who exactly they are and what they really deserve and eventually find ways to reach what they deserve.
There is a need to raise women consciousness to self-discovery and to determine their own identity. In other words, women should realize their subjectivity, decide who they really are and choose what they want to be.
To examine the pathways to transformation, this study will use Rector’s enlightenment spectrum which is divided into three spectrums; casual concern, interconnectedness and unity consciousness.69 Then, three alternatives to
67 Martha C. Nussbaum “Objectification”, 260. 68 Ibid. 260. 69 John M. Rector, The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 225 - 243
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overcome objectification are (i) emerging casual concern, (ii) building interconnectedness, and (iii) promoting unity consciousness.
5.1. Emerging Casual Concern
Casual concern is placed at the low end of the enlightenment spectrum. It demonstrates the state of mild awareness and appreciation of human basic kinship with the rest of humanity. It requires a set-point of general goodwill toward the world-at-large, regardless of others’ nationality, ethnicity, colour, sexual preference, political affiliation, or religious creed.70 The Casually concerned individual has a vague sense that his/her own moment-to moment experience of life is only one of billions going on at any given moment, and that his/her own view of reality may only be one of many, and may not necessarily represent “the truth”.71 In this state, an individual with casual concern has the ability to notice, to pay attention, and to care about other people. This individual is away from being self-centered. On finding his/her subjectivity, he/she will embrace and respect others’ life experiences. Under this awareness, women experience self-discovery.
Women initiate to understand who they really are among others. Women ask about their subjectivity. It includes identifying what they deserve in life.
5.2. Building Interconnectedness
In the middle of enlightenment spectrum is interconnectedness. Individual builds interconnectedness by heightening awareness of the commonalities that all human beings share desire to love and to be loved, to commit oneself to meaningful purposes, and to have capacities to provide for one’s basic needs in a
70 John M. Rector, The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 228. 71 Ibid, 229.
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dignified way. Therefore, this individual feels strong desire for all human beings to have “opportunities to live under benevolent and access to the provision of basic service that supports human dignity i.e. education, healthcare, adequate housing, etc.”72 This individual is also very strongly committed to the ideals of non-violence, appreciating its potential to be powerful force to diminish oppression and to generate social progress without destroying life.73 In this level of awareness, women use their ability to develop relationship among them and elevate their potential capacity to set them free from oppression.
5.3. Promoting Unity Consciousness
Unity consciousness represents the highest point of human awareness acclaimed by the world’s great wisdom tradition. At the highest stage of apprehension, human beings perceive themselves as parts of all existence in the universe, experiencing detachment or disinterestedness. It does not mean that human beings in this state are perfected in moral, intellectual, or social senses, but, as human beings, they continue to struggle with certain weaknesses and
“blind spots” until they are no longer alive. This awareness is typified by acceptance of the present moment as it is. As a result, people in this level are capable of dealing with challenges mindfully, to stay centered in the present experience, rather than to be lost in thought or to react to their feeling. In this point, women are able to create literal ‘zones of liberation’ around themselves, and to inspire others to transcend the limitations.
5.4. Constructing Women Identity
72 John M. Rector, The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 229. 73 Ibid. 230
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This study also applies sociological approach to examine the construction of identity that the main character had undergone which is at the same time reflects ongoing process in the society. It examines the journey of the eponymous character to find her entity and define her identity amidst oppressive cultural circumstances where she belongs. By inventing new narrative, Eva Luna mixes her imagination with some other given narratives (opera, news and play broadcasted in radio, story told by her abuela), configures them so that the new narrative links the past and the present and the same time gives reasons to the recent situations. Telling the story is part of endeavour to explain or discover the hidden reality to untie it, to understand it and to give it a new meaning.
To examine the alternative way to survive under oppressive situation and to deal with various manifestations of objectification, Steph Lawrer’s theory of identity provides a route on making narrative and on constructing identity. It is an active response which includes these three levels of apprehension i.e. constructing narrative. The construction of identity is an ongoing process, a continuation.
Identity cannot be constructed solitary but negotiated with other identity. Lawrer states that
“Identity needs to be understood not as belonging ‘within’ the individual person, but as produced between person and within social relation…identity is socially produced, socially embedded, and work out in people’s everyday social lives.”
As a project to be work on, identity construction involves the significance of memory, history, and storytelling. Identities can be understood as “being made through narratives”. Narrating story is a creative device to rearrange story of life.
The way to see the process of self-narrating can then be synchronized with the
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process of developing identity. Narrative is constructed through selecting various
'raw materials that are already available in our memory. We configure those important or selected elements and elaborate them into characters (human-non- human), action (including transformations) and plot. The way to see the process of narrating life story can be synchronized with process of developing identity, as mentioned by Lawrer:
…one way of reading the narrative would be to see it as reflecting a process of developing an identity which occurs quite independently of the narrative. An alternative way of seeing it, …as engage in processes of producing an identity through assembling various memories, experiences, episodes, etc., within narrative. …identities can be seen as being creatively produced through various raw materials available – notably, memories, understandings, experiences and interpretations.74
Personal narrative can be considered as configured memory, as a way of seeing and understanding the world. It becomes a resource to use when thinking about or constituting our own life history. In the process it becomes a resource in constituting narrative identities. Learner, referring Steedman (1996: 103), states that through ways of understanding identity that have been given to us by history, one’s very identity is produced:
In the project of finding an identity through the processes of historical identification, the past is search for something (someone, some groups, and some series of events) that confirms the searchers in his or her sense of self, confirms that as they want to be and feel in some measure that they already are. The search is for all the ideas, and times, and images, that will give us, now, solidity and meaning in time.75
Who we are in the present might be influenced, but not always determined, by who we were in the past. Through historical identification, we trace back to the
74 Steph Lawler, Identity: Sociological Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Malden: Polity Press, 2014), 24 75 Ibid, 35.
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past to confirm what makes who we are in the present. Complete understanding and acceptance of who we were in the past and an idea of who we are in the future are reconciled with what is called 'present'; today is no other than a meeting and negotiations between our past and our future. Acceptance is a key into transformation. Only by accepting the past, one can tolerate the present.
C. Theoretical Framework
There are two important aspects to understand Nussbaum’s objectification theory; firstly, seven objectification features cannot be completely separated.76
They intersect, one feature can lead to another feature, one case of objectification may represent one or more features. Secondly, not every feature of objectification contains negative notion.77 Nussbaum says that it depends on the context of relationship between individuals, whether or not it represents undesirable treatments.
Nussbaum asserts that not all objectification features are undesirable, thus some healthy relationships have aspects of objectification built into them. It means that there are some degrees that objectifications do not lead to oppression.
Since this study focuses on women objectifications as basis of women oppression, it needs to underline the features of objectification as negative treatments that lead into oppression. Therefore, Cahill’s derivatization and Rector’s spectrum of misapprehension will be applied and combined with Nussbaum’s objectification theory.
76 Martha C. Nussbaum “Objectification”, 257-263 77 Ibid, 265. See the example quoted on Review of Theoretical Concepts, page 22.
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Objectification can occur regardless sex, gender, class, and race, thus, it is important to see how women in the novel are prone to be objectified. The novel provides evidence that women’s objectification is not simple reality. It must include several analysis to examine the aspect which produces unjust and undesirable women relation both with men and among them, either in public sphere or domestic sphere. Thus, to examine women’s objectification as basis of women’s oppression, we need to include related issues such as class, race, gender relation, within a system that potentially tolerates the oppression i.e. patriarchy and capitalism which facilitates greater role of men in many areas.
Janice Hakeen states that under patriarchal society, oppression to women has been pervasive among particular groups in the society. This oppression cannot be seen as a single entity of women-men problematic relationship; it is inseparable with, and at the same time a reflection of, unjust power relation that occurs in the society. This unjust power relation manifests in many forms as Young called as exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence.
The oppression which is sustained within the operation of racial slavery similarly revealed in domestic area within a family. Under the patriarchal circumstances, women are placed in difficult situation as opportunity to express, to gain self- determination, to make decision for themselves.
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CHAPTER III THREE FACES OF WOMEN’S OBJECTIFICATION
This chapter discusses about how women objectification is depicted in
Allende’s Eva Luna. (For future reference all citation from this novel will use initial EL with pagination only.) It discusses different faces of women objectification as a kernel of women oppression and explains about different consequences emerging from different responses to women objectification. The discussion is divided into three divisions which explains three different level of human misapprehension.
A. Dehumanization: slavery as severe manifestation of women oppression
The novel provides background of a country and its native inhabitants embracing the history of colonization. The novel describes its setting as a place without name, depicted as “an enchanted region where for centuries adventurers have searched for the city of pure gold that conquistadors saw when they peered into the abyss of their ambitions” (EL, 3). This region is depicted as a place that geographically and politically has been long time colonized by Spanish conquest, in which the people “marked forever by that landscape, and passes the sign to their descendant” (EL, 3).
The novel describes that worse situation can happen when women who are trapped in pervasive poverty fall into prostitution business. It is represented by twenty-five Dominican and Trinidadian women who are forced to be victims of modern Caribbean slave traffic:
They are treated terribly, smuggled in a sealed compartment that contained air for only twelve hours. Because of a bureaucratic
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foul-up, they are hold in 78the cargo vessel for two days and eventually pass away. Those who are alive, still, end up in a brothels “where they found themselves trapped in a web of threats and debt”. (EL, 186)
The social segregation is rooted from the past. It follows a series of historical events where the conquistadors79 controlled natives. This historical background is important to see what happened in the past where the native people’s autonomy was denied, where their subjectivity was neglected for the sake of gold mines. At this point, Allende shows that oppression is rooted from the past; it is a historical legacy.
Susan M. Socolow states that the most dramatic changes by the European conquest occurred in the sphere of religion. Indian women and men are forced to abandon their "heathen" ways and adopt Roman Catholicism. Women have had a relatively minor role in the religious ritual of pre-Conquest societies. After the
Conquest, women were usually faster and better converts to Christianity, perhaps because the Catholic Church provided Indian women with new forms of religious expression and a degree of spiritual continuity.80
Because of racial 'stain', women of colour have no claim to honour. They are considered less respectable and deserve the low standard of live. Socolow states that "Virtuous" sexual conduct was sees as being outside the ken of slave and the moral code that privileged virginity in women did not extend to any black mullata. Society did not attempt to limit the sexuality of slaves, slave owners
79 Conquistador is one of the Spanish people who travelled to America in the 16th century and took control of Mexico and Peru. Based on the history of Latin America, the Spanish conquestadors opened gold mines in Peru and Mexico on the Mapuche land in Chile during 16 century, and before they came, Mayan had occupied some of Mapuche territory. The history still exists in the present society. 80 Susan M. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America 2nd ed., (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 50-51.
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themselves controlled the sexuality of slave women by restricting their freedom and enjoying unimpeded access to their bodies.81
Women’s slavery in South America is depicted by most of women characters in Eva Luna. Poverty clings to those who come from lower class, poor family or group without having any access to economic sources and bargaining position. The relation between white master and non-white slaves is illustrated in the home life of Professor Jones. Three women characters in Eva Luna, Consuelo,
Eva, and an anonymous woman called Madrina, live as servants in Professor
Jones’ mansion. Consuelo, Eva’s mother, spends almost her entire life in
Professor Jones’s mansion as a slave. Her slavery ends when she passes during celebrating Christmas with other servants in the back patio due to a chicken bone stuck in her throat, cut something vitals, and makes her bleeding internally. The cook, an anonymous mullato woman, is a woman who helps Consuelo’s labour and eventually becomes Eva’s madrina or godmother after taking her to church to christen her (EL, 40, 41). Eva who is born and raised as servant under the same roof of the mansion, moves from one patrona to another patrona after the death of the professor until she finds Elvira, a servant in her second patrona’s house, who thinks that “God made her too poor ever to have a family” (EL, 50).
Professor Jones is depicted as an unsympathetic person who lives mostly in his own world and who is disconnected to the existence of his non-white servants.
He lives in his own world and negates the existence of servants, who are all non- white. This European scientist employs the women from community he considered as “barbarian, black savages, superstitious, ignorant, and illiterate
81 Susan M. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 144.
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fools” (EL, 23). He barely shows any sympathy to them, even to a dying Indian gardener bitten by Surucucu, the most venomous snakes commonly found in
Brazil. To him, Indian gardener’s death is merely an opportunity for his scientific experiment to preserve corpses.
Professor Jones is an anti-socialist scientist who is a supporter of authoritarian regimes and pessimistic about socialist revolution for social welfare and equality in the country. He distrusts democracy which he considers vulgar and too much like socialism. However, he devoted himself to the task of preserving the body of his ideological enemy; a local lawyer well known in life for his liberal inclinations killed under the order of brutal a dictator El Benefactor. (EL, 11)
Through the depiction of master represented by Professor Jones and his slave’s daily life, the novel tells us about imbalanced power relation between the native, mostly women, and the European master. It also explains how natives are racially segregated from European people in some areas. In other words, it describes the reality that the native and European are in different classes.
The sixth objectification feature proposed by Nussbaum is ownership; which treats the object as something that is owned and as something that can be bought or sold. Nussbaum states that slavery is one of the manifestations of ownership:
Slavery is defined as a form of ownership. This form of ownership entails denial of autonomy…I believe that it is something about the type of ownership involved in slavery and its relation to the humanity of the slave that makes this connection. Once one treats a human being as a thing one may buy or sell, one is ipso facto treating that human being as a tool of one’s own purposes.82
82 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Objectification”, 264.
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Nussbaum shows that the ownership is incompatible with autonomy. Here we see that by being owned, people lose their autonomy. Three features of objectifications from Nussbaum performed in this narration are instrumentality, as these women are treated as tool to economic purposes; ownership, as they can be bought or sold, and denial of autonomy, as they lose their freedom to choose life destiny.
This narrative of slavery shows that even in their poverty, women are economically exploited, and physically tortured due to the sins of omission of those who are in power, as Allende stated:
Most of our republics are dependent on submissiveness. Our institutions and laws are inefficient. Our armed forces often act as mercenaries for privileges social group that pays tribute to transactional enterprises. We are living in the worst economic, political and social crisis since the conquest of America by the Spaniards.83
Under patriarchal circumstances, women fall into slavery and they become merely property. Once women become property, they can be treated as they lose their autonomy to defend themselves. This kind of situation is depicted in Eva’s childhood. Eva encounters unjust and terrible situation as lower-class girl, a servant living under the control of patrona (master). She forcibly lives in the state of domestic dependence, works hard only for food and roof to stay. Living dependently under the authority of the white master as slaves; women lose the ability to determine their better future.
This situation explains that sometimes women bodies, which are supposed to be their authority, are considered as commodity. They are exploited not only
83 Isabel Allende, “Writing as an Act of Hope”, 42.
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due to their race, but also because of being women who economically have no power to access and control the system. These women somehow are placed in a class within a class. It explains that “oppression is not merely a product of patriarchal structure per se but related to capitalist modes of production”84 which creates unequal relationship between those who are economically powerful and those who are powerless.
Janice Hakeen states that social class shapes alliances among people and that oppression to women has been pervasive among particular group in the society.85 The oppression sustained within the operation of racial slavery is similarly revealed in domestic area within a family. It is clearly depicted in the novel in two different settings. First, in South America where twenty-five
Dominican and Trinidadian women fall into human trafficking (EL, 186) and second, in Austria where Frau Carle, a mother of three children, is tortured worse by her husband severely in her own house.
Frau Carlé is a mother of three children who struggles to survive from violent husband, Lucas Carlé. Lucas, a heartless solitary person, is a teacher who barely gains any respect from his students due to his severe behaviour. He is also an army deserter in Second World War who escapes by stealing the identification papers of fallen soldier. For him, war is grounded for exercising cruelty and for increasing his capacity to terrorize his family. (EL 25-29)
Living in poverty and socially alienated, Lucas Carlé articulates his dissatisfaction and anger to his fragile family. He believes that “man is made for
84 Nancy Holmstrom, (2002) 2. See chapter II, p. 13. 85 Janice Haaken “Stories of Survival: Class, Race, and Domestic Violence” in Nancy Holmstrom, The Socialist Feminist Project, A Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2002) 105.
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war and that history demonstrates that progress is never achieved without violence” (EL, 33). This belief eventually facilitates his misconduct to his wife and children; Rolf, Jochen, and Khatarina. His choice to be dehumanizer is justified this belief.
Lucas’ misbehaviour cannot be separated from his social context. The relationship between Lucas Carle and Frau Carle explains about how cultural context forms understanding of family mutual relationship. In addition, domestic violence in a form of domestic slavery has been resulted from fallacious concept of gender relation in society. This kind of relation is a reflection of patriarchal social order where men take advantage from subordination of women regardless any kinds of mode of production carried out in the society. Janice Hakeen states:
Whether feudal, capitalist, or socialist, societies throughout history have sanctioned male violence as a means of maintaining a patriarchal social order. Men benefit materially and psychologically from the subordination of women. Further, the threat of violence keeps women from actively resisting. Organizing around domestic violence allows women to expose the grisly reality behind the façade of patriarchal protection, and to dramatize the state of crisis in this creates for women.86
It shows that social class shapes alliances among people, including those within the family. Repeated oppression to women has been prevalent among particular group in the society. Hakeen sees that domestic violence must be understood within the wider context of social and economic forces impinging upon families and communities:
…power does not rely primarily on the exercise of direct violence. As a means of social control, violence is ill-suited to a system based on creating highly motivated workers and on extracting maximum value from human productive activity. At
86 Janice Haaken, “Stories of Survival: Class, Race, and Domestic Violence”, 105.
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the same time, physical violence through police powers, as well as economic violence in the form of inadequate food, housing, heathcare, or employment, are endemic in many communities.87
The way Lucas Carle treated Frau indicates at least 3 of 7 categories
Nussbaum stated as objectifying88; (1) women as permissible to break, smash, or break into (violability), (2) as something that is owned by another (ownership), and/or (3) as something whose experience and feelings do not need to be considered (denial of subjectivity). Frau is objectified by her husband through reduction of her personhood, rendering her as object. Lucas uses terror to oppress and subjugate his wife.89
Lucas Carlé also shows the intention to exploit and humiliate his wife. He treats Frau as an object of pleasure. He uses, manipulates, controls and considers his wife as his personal property. His oppressive behaviour is “motivated by an intent to exploit (i.e., benefit disproportionately from the resources, capacities, and productivity of others) and it results typically in disadvantageous, unjust condition of living for its victims”.90 Lucas objectifies Frau in a very harsh way, inhumanly.
He dehumanizes his wife, and at the same time sets himself to be a dehumanizer.
Frau Carlé is severely ill-treated by her husband due to an idea that women belong to lower class, a class of the inferior being. To Lucas Carlé, Frau Carlé is an inferior being that is closer to animal than to a man, while the man is God’s
87 Janice Haaken“Stories of Survival: Class, Race, and Domestic Violence”, 106. 88 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Objectification”, 257. 89 J.L. Goldenberg “Immortal Objects: The Objectification of Woman as Terror Management” in Sarah J. Gervais, Objectification and (De)humanization, 60th Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. (New York, Springer, 2013) 81. 90 Collins, P.H. (1993). Towards a new vision: Race, Class and Gender as categories of analysis and connection. Race, Sex and Clas, 1.(1), 25-45
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only intelligent creation. Despite a theory acknowledging a woman as a creature who deserves compassion, in practise Frau Carlé drives him out of his mind.
Domestic slavery shown by Lucas is resulted from misapprehension of human subjectivity. It is preserved by fallacious concept of gender relation, the grounds of domestic violence. Lucas treats Frau Carlé severely based on the idea that women belong to different, lower status, of creatures. For Lucas Carlé, as a woman, Frau Carlé is merely “an inferior being that is closer to animal than to a man, while the man is God’s only intelligent creation” (EL, 26), so that she deserves to be destroyed. In the case of domestic slavery endured by Frau Carlé, besides denial of autonomy, ownership, and instrumentality, the features of violability is also performed. The violability occurs since Frau is treated as
“lacking in integrity, as something that is permissible to break up, smash, and break into” 91 as depicted in the novel:
He had chosen her because he liked the sudden gleam of terror he saw in her eyes, and he approve of her broad hips, which he considered necessary for begetting male offspring and for doing heavy housework. He was also influenced in his decision by two hectares of land, a half dozen head of cattle, and a small income the girl had inherited from her father; all of which he immediately claim as legitimate wealth (EL, 26).
For man likes Lucas Carlé, an ideal bride is a woman who is affluent and feeble. Married to this woman gives him financial security and allows him to show male superiority. Lucas shows his power through domestic violence over his family, mainly his wife, to win. When he cannot win any war outside home, he seeks out possible war to win. He overpowers his family and makes them enemies to defeat easily by creating fear and forcing obedience.
91 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Objectification”, 257.
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The novel shows three different narratives slavery: slavery of three female servants in Professor Jones’ mansion, slavery of Dominican and Trinidadian women, and domestic slavery of Frau Carle. It explains that women bodies, which are supposed to be their authority, are considered as commodity. They are exploited. They do not have economic power to access and control the system.
These imbalance relationships between slave and master occur when a person repudiates other’s humanity.
Women objectification as basis of oppression does not end in domestic space within family. It also happens and involves individuals, groups or institutions in the society. Domestic violence, represented by male violence in the novel, is a means of maintaining a patriarchal social order which allows men to benefit materially and psychologically from the subordination of women. Even ideally family can be a place to promote equality; in fact, class, race, and gender inequality in society create a context for unequal distribution of social opportunities in domestic area. Under the patriarchal circumstances, unequal power relation within men and women in domestic area places women in the worst possible position. The situation even worse for women in poverty as the opportunity to lift up their wellbeing is very limited due to limited access to resources such as education, proper job, even right to express their ideas. It happens because men usually tend to be prioritized to access the resources related to their given position as head of households.
B. Derivatization; Women inferiority under men’s dominance.
Second spectrum of misapprehension is derivatization which is also clearly presented in the novel. While dehumanization sees women subjectivity as less
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than human or even inhuman, the derivatization sees women subjectivity as human, but reduces it as reflection, projection, or expression of men’s identity, desires, fears, etc.92 In Eva Luna, depiction about women whose subjectivity is reduced, disregarded, and under-valued” is conveyed through Consuelo, Eva, madrina, and Elvira.
Consuelo, madrina, and Elvira or abuela are central character for Eva.
These women, by any condition, remain poor, illiterate or uneducated, and live with the absence of bargaining position in social life. They are unwillingly, but frequently, repress their desire to uplift their fortune, end up their life as servant.
All these women live in the state of domestic dependence, lose self-confidence to determine their life destiny and look themselves down or feel inferior.
The feeling of inferiority does not only present in relationship among women in work place, between master and slaves, or between men and women in social life but also presents in personal relationship between a man and a woman.
It is obviously described when, in one occasion, Eva had to accept Huberto
Naranjo, her lover, as superior being. Naranjo believes that being born as a girl is being at a disadvantage, thus, a man presents to make decision for girl:
I should accept my limitations and entrust myself to others’ care […] I would never be independent […] For Naranjo, and others like him, “the people” seemed to be composed exclusively of men; we women should contribute to the struggle but were excluded from decision-making and power. (EL, 207)
Naranjo shows his superiority to control Eva by taking advantages from his higher position in society as Guerrilla fighter. He refuses the idea that women have right to participate in country’s struggle. This feeling of inferiority can be
92 A.J. Cahill, Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics, (Ney York: Routledge, 2011) qtd in John M. Rector, (2014), 27.
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seen as a result of denial of autonomy, which is described by Nussbaum as a situation where women are treated as lacking of self-determination.
“You can’t stay with me. A woman can’t live on the street,” Huberto Naranjo announced about six, when not a soul was left in the bar and even the love songs on the jukebox had died. Outside, day was breaking as always: traffic beginning to move and a few people were hurrying by. “But it was your idea!”“Yes, but then you were a kid.”
The logic of this reasoning escaped me completely. I felt much better prepared to face my fate now that I was a little older and thought I knew the world. Naranjo explained that it was just the opposite: because I was older, I needed even more to be protected by man, at least while I was young; later it wouldn’t matter, because no one would be interested in me, anyway. I’m not asking you to protect me, no one is after me. (EL, 104)
The quote explains how a woman does not really expect to be treated as a feeble or need to be protected by people especially man. On the other hand, man, no matter how difficult his situation is, tries to take a role as woman’s protector.
Naranjo is contained with a strong sense of masculine pride inside. As objectifier,
Naranjo is driven by the idea of manhood that brings out the sense of being macho in front of Eva. Naranjo denies Eva’s ability to make her own decision as he thinks that a man is meant “to be a hero…and the nightmare of the guardia”. (EL,
58). His duty is to safe people. This idea cannot easily be removed as it is deeply rooted from childhood. At sixteen, he already determines himself to be a feared and respected leader of street gang.
This idea of manhood profoundly is embedded by Naranjo, who in any kind of situations will voluntarily take responsibility to provide, protect, and defend women either their lover or their family. He projects his fear towards Eva. He projects his desire to win the battle as revolutionary guerrilla towards his
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relationship with Eva. Winning the battles, both on battle field and over his relationship with Eva is about establishing power. There is no equality within this war, and regardless of the result, the idea that man should win is fixed, unchangeable for him. “Even after all the battles and passions, all the encounters and arguments, all the rebellions and defeats; it is never enough to change his mind.” (EL, 208)
Man’s superiority is also presented by Tolomeo Rodriguez, an influential colonel who obtains respect from young officers, an inspector of a factory where
Eva works as secretary. The general, a husband and a father of three daughters shows tendency to take control in relationship with Eva. When Eva confidently and courteously refuses him, he feels offended and angry:
The Colonel leapt to his feet, his face fiery red…He sat down stiffly, breathing rapidly, apparently composing his thought. "I don’t know what kind of women you are...Under normal circumstances, I would accept your challenge and we would immediately go somewhere private. But I've decided to go about this in different way. I won’t beg you. I am sure you will come to me, and if you are lucky my proposition will still stand. Call me when you want to see me" (EL, 222)
The Colonel’s anger reflects his disappointment for being rejected by a woman who in his expectation will be easily overpowered. He plays a role of derivatizer,93 but he fails. He denies Eva’s subjectivity by excluding her feelings.
He undervalues Eva’s capacity to make choices.
Being born as a female or a male has brought them social consequences that for their whole life, they should play particular and ‘different’ role expected by the culture or the society. Sometimes it is considered unfair or unequal by the
93 John M. Rector The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 27.
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female. It assumes that as a young woman, Eva Luna’s ability to handle her situation is doubted due to her personal reality as a female.
“How old are you?” “Thirteen, more or less.” “Don’t worry, no one is born pretty, it takes patience and hard work to get that way. But it’s worth it, because if you’re pretty, all your troubles are over. To begin with, lift your head and smile.” “I’d rather learn to read.” “That’s Naranjo’s foolishness. Pay attention no to him. Men are arrogant, always telling you what to do. It’s better to say yes to everything and then do whatever you please.”
The dialogue between La Senora and Eva Luna explains that not only a woman is needed to be protected but also needed to be guided to find the best thing in her life. It is not only man who usually thinks that way, but La Senora represents the woman that agrees with such a thought. Besides, women were born to be aware of their physical reality more than non-physical things like their intellect, aspiration, and dream.
At the age I was not interested in politics, but Elvira filled my head with subversive ideas to offset the beliefs of our employers. “Everythings in this country is crooked, little bird. Too many yellow haired gringos, I say. One of these days they’ll carry the whole country off with them, and we’ll find ourselves plunk in the middle of the ocean – that’s what I say.”
The dona of the locket was of exactly the opposite opinion. “how unfortunate that we were discovered by Christoper Colombus and not an Englishman. It takes determined people of sturdy stock to build roads through the forest, sow crops on the plains, and industrialize the nation, Wasn’t that what they did in the united states? And look where that country is today!” (EL, 67)
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Much of the continuum of objectification is typified by derivatization.94
Derivatization can function in various contexts and circumstances and entail wide range of behaviour that can be engaged to mild, moderate, and severe degrees.95
One of the features within this range is sexual objectification or sexualisation which is understood as separating sexual functions out from the rest of personality and reducing it to the status of mere instruments as if they were capable of representing the whole personality:
By definition, the sexualization and objectification of girls and women in patriarchal societies …are related. Objectification is typically defined as a culture’s tendency to treat a women’s bodies as objects rather than as active, autonomous entities. …sexual objectification – that is, women’s bodies are treated as objects for the sexual pleasure of men.96
Sexual objectification, or sexualization, is an antecedent to self- objectification which leads to self-surveillance and body shame.97 The notion of self-sexualization is depicted by Zulema:
She was afraid…of being abandoned by her husband,…of losing her beauty,…, of growing old. I am sure that in her heart she loathed Riad Halabi, but neither could she leave him; she chose to put up with him rather than work to support herself. Intimacy with him repelled her, but at the same time she was consciously seductive as means to hold him, terrified that he might find pleasure with another woman…Zulema had been educated to serve and please a man…her only enthusiasms were gold and jewels. (EL, 115)
94 John M. Rector The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 27. 95 Ibid. 28. 96 Linda Smolak and Sarah K. Murnen, “The Sexualization of Girls and Women as Primary Antecedent of Self-Objectification” in Rachel M. Calogero ed., Self-Objectification in Women, Causes, Consequences, and Counteraction, (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2011), 53 97 Ibid, 53.
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The quotation shows that Zulema uses her body to keep herself reliant on
Halabi, maintaining her subordinate societal position. Sexualisation teaches girls and women that there are rewards for being sexy e.g. that attracting a man which requires sex appeal will ensure financial stability and personal safety.
Consequently, there are punishments, or at least fewer opportunities, for not following the sexy norms. Like Zulema, women who perform self-sexualization
“view sexiness as a source of power and might, therefore, actively participate in their own sexualization”.98
The impression that both men and women can possibly support the idea of sexual objectification is clearly depicted by Senor Aravena and Burgel on treating the twins, Rupert and Burgel’s daughters. Aravena is the country’s most important newspaper businessman, Rupert and Burgel’s best client, who spends almost every weekend at Rupert’s inn. Even when his way on treating the twins is sexually degrading women; there is not a sign of objection from the twins or their parents toward Aravena’s misbehaviour.
He alone was allowed the luxury of pinching Rolf’s cousins’ magnificent buttocks, because he did it with grace, in no spirit of offense, merely of rendering due tribute. “Come here, my adorable Valkyries, let this humble newspaperman feel your heavenly ass; and even Burgel would laugh as her daughter turn a backside and he ceremoniously lifted and embroidered felt skirts and fell into rhapsodies at the sight of those orbs enchased in girlish under-drawers. (EL, 90)
…and during his outing at La Colonia, and occasional veiled glance toward the majestic but now forbidden bottoms of the daughters of Uncle Rupert… (EL, 119).
98 Linda Smolak and Sarah K. Murnen, “The Sexualization of Girls and Women as Primary Antecedent of Self-Objectification”, 54.
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The newspapermen show that touching women bodies like pinching and poking twins’ buttocks is tolerable. He does it without the twin’s consent. The illustration shows that sexual objectification in the form of men’s gaze can take place in daily basis and that women exist in the culture in which their bodies are looked at and evaluated.
Aravena demonstrates an idea that women can be treated as tools to fulfil men’s desire. His misapprehension to the twin’s subjectivity is performed by reducing their subjectivity into merely sexual object i.e. sexualisation. The sexualisation possibly happens not only due to man’s misapprehension to women subjectivity but also due to woman’s submissiveness.
Different with Zulema, Eva succeeds in demonstrating her ability to make decision for any risk that might be taken. Regardless of the power of the Colonel that cannot be easily restrained, Eva, the derivatized person, Eva dares to demonstrate aspects of her subjectivity, which is unexpected by the Colonel, she is perceived as “arrogant, treasonous, and dangerously rebellious.”99 Yet, in Eva’s perspective, she demonstrates a turning point of her subjectivity, from previously being subjugated by Naranjo, to be liberated by the courage to break her inertness; taking back her agency as women subject.
. In Latin America one proverb held "rather mistress of a white man than wife of a negro."100 Eva smashes and steps across boundary of race and class when she accepts Rolf Carle, a fragile white man and liberates his imprisoned soul from long nightmares, not because he is white. Eva plays an important role as a saviour to Rolf Carle. Eva married Rolf Carle without notion of lifting up the
99 Cahill (2011), 23. qtd in John M. Rector, (2014), 27. 100 Susan M. Sacolow, (2015), 145.
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degree of prestige because Rolf, with his fragility to face reality, becomes complete with Eva's strength to deal with reality. On the other hand, Eva finds respect and admission to her autonomy from Rolf, something she could not receive from Naranjo.
C. Casual Indifference: Ignorance performed by religious institution
In the mild expression of objectification is casual indifference. Most of people unintentionally experience casual indifference. Casual indifference is characterized by “perceiving little affective connection between oneself and most others…It includes the experience of having little or no discernible emotional discomfort at the realization of some distant others’ suffering”101 In the other words, casual indifference can be understood as tendency to deny, to allow, or to tolerate unexpected situation by not giving any attention or pretending to not knowing it.
One of the notions of casual indifference in the novel is depicted within the narration of Consuelo and two religious institutions in which Consuelo experiences ignorance and inertness. It is Consuelo who is found by a priest before she learned to walk, then brought up without excitement or effort to find out where she came from. Her origin seems unimportant. The very reason for them to keep on bringing Consuelo up is that she was already there and it is not appropriate to return her back to where she has been found because it opposes
Divine Providence:
…they were sure that if Divine Providence had kept her alive until they found her, it would also watch over her physical and
101 John M. Rector The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 24.
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spiritual well-being…would bear her off to heaven along with the other innocents. Consuelo grew up without any fixed niche in the strict hierarchy of the Mission. She was not exactly a servant, but neither did she have the status of the Indian boys in the school, and when she asked which of the priests was her father she was cuffed for her insolence (EL, 4).
Despite giving her lucid or sensible explanation about her identity, the priests disregard the girl’s right to link to her family kin and to know the reason of being there in the Mission. She does not know her parents and why she is there with the priests. They let her “knew nothing about her origins or left her with no idea on how she had come to be where the missionaries found her.” (EL, 4)
The rescue of little Consuelo by the priest once seems to be altruistic or humane action but then considered less sincere; they do not give her a name properly. The priests do not expect to find a girl. The fact that the baby whom they find is a girl displeases them. They choose baptism name without particular intention, without conveying their hope or clear purpose and pray. The name is not a well-chosen name.
By this depiction, Allende tells readers that it is possible for a group of people who have been trained to perform religious and pastoral duties, pay less attention to the presence of a girl in their life. Her existence is not significant for the Mission. Even though she has a place to stay, she has no space to play. She does not have access to her history. Part of Consuelo’s reality, that her origin is more important than her feelings is concealed by the ignorance of the religious elite. As human, her presence is entirely neglected.
After the Mission, the next dwelling of Consuelo is a convent of the Little
Sisters of Charity. From the Mission to the Convent is like a journey to the same
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rough place as nuns in the Convent only replicates what Missionaries do in the
Mission.
She made the trip along with five native girls; all tied by the ankle to prevent their jumping from tie pirogue and disappearing into the river…none of it surprised the girl, for any person who first opens her eyes in the most hallucinatory land on earth loses the ability to be amazed. On that long journey she wept all the tears stored in her soul, leaving none in reserve for later sorrows. Once her tears were exhausted, she closed her lips, resolving from that moment forward to open them only when it could not be avoided (EL, 6).
They do not ask Consuelo and other girls their agreement or disagreement of the journey they were taken. The religious authority does not give any opportunity for the girls to decide or make choices about their life. Those two examples explain how by only being a girl, a person is easily being objectified.
Consuelo’s feelings are not taken into account, Consuelo undergoes denial of subjectivity under the subtle form of human misapprehension; casual indifference.
Women are voiceless towards self-righteous institution with the authority to determine one’s future and destiny.
Living in the Convent, Consuelo “soaks in the ritual words of the Mass, the
Sunday sermons, the pious readings, the night noises, the wind in the colonnades, the witless expressions of the saints and anchorites in the niches of the church”
(EL, 7-8). The nuns even meddle with private matter such as forcing the girls to believe Christianity, to obey dogmas, and to communicate with God in particular way. Being forced to understand Christian dogmas, Consuelo believes in God without personal affiliation to the religion. She is alienated from her personal understanding and emotion about God.
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The religious institution shows how their knowledge becomes a device to discipline people. Susan M. Socolow states that in Latin America, the church, under the guise of freedom of choice in marriage, also tried to end the control of the Indian nobility over marriage choices of commoners. At the same time the church work to implement its kinship prohibition on marriage, rules that were probably unintelligible to the Indian population. At firs the church tended to accept Indian customs except when they were deemed to be repugnant to natural law and Christian morality.102
Religious institution controls women through education, sometimes using punishment. The convent provides them only the opportunity to do domestic works. “They learned to wear shoes, eat with a fork, and master a few elementary domestic skills, so that later they could be employed in humble serving positions, for it was assumed that they were incapable of anything else.” She cannot refuse it openly because it is followed by repression, bringing together offense or sin in the fires of hell and promises a haven for obedience. She declines it silently.
From the Mission she learns how to lock the words inside her mind and to use them only in great demand. She learns how to deal with oppressive religious practices using her power of silence. She is eventually proficient in holding her tongue and “prudently suppressed the treasure of her prodigious flow of fables” until one day her daughter, Eva, gives her the opportunity to unloose the torrent of words stored within her.
In this situation Eva Luna provides us with depiction that religious institution, the church, which is supposed to promote equity and social justice,
102 Susan M. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, 142.
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potentially carries out exclusion and discrimination. It unintentionally becomes an oppressive force that induces people to accept an idea as something that is 'taken for granted' and to define what good and bad, determine what important and unimportant in life. It does not perform “general goodwill toward the world-at- large regardless of ethnicity, colour, and sexual preference”, it ignores its own capacity to value dignity of human beings. It fails to maintain basic kinship with the rest of humanity.
We can summarize the discussion in chapter III into several points: Firstly, that women objectification can be seen as a kernel of women oppression and that there are three level of objectifications appearing in Allende’s Eva Luna. In the worst or severe level of Rector’s spectrum of misapprehension is dehumanization.
It manifests in the form of women slavery experienced by a group of Dominican and Trinidadian victims of slave trafficking. It is also endured by Frau Carle in specific for; domestic violence, which is mainly rooted on idea of viability. It includes process of dehumanization, which is defined as representation of a psychological process occurring in people’s mind which allows them to act in vicious way.
Secondly, men’s superiority is followed by women’s inferiority. This tone is depicted in the case of lovers’ relationship between Naranjo and Eva, and the case of power relationship in work place represented by Colonel Rodriquez on treating Eva as a person whose experiences and feelings as women are not important, thus, they can be ignored. It meets the concept of denial of subjectivity from Nussbaum and derivatization from Cahill.
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These examples describe that even though women are seen as human, but they are reduced into merely object, merely projection of men’s desire. Under the spectrum of misapprehension suggested by Rector, this stage locates in the second level; derivatization.
Thirdly, ignorance performed by religious institution. It is depicted by the act of the religious institution, the church toward Consuelo. Consuelo’s existence is not significant for the Mission since the priests who find her do not expect that the child they found is a girl. As a human, her presence is entirely neglected.
The ignorance also happened when Consuelo and other girls are taken to
Convent without their agreement. It illustrates that religious group does not give any opportunity for the girls to decide or make choices about their life. It explains how a person is easily being objectified due to her sex. Consuelo’s and other girls’ feelings are not taken into account.
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CHAPTER IV COPING WITH OBJECTIFICATION
In chapter III we have examined the root of this oppressive situation; women objectification. We also have found several features of objectification which span within three levels or spectrums of misapprehension (see summary of chapter III, page 51-52). To deal with objectification, women should first understand and recognize who exactly they are and what they deserve in life, determine what they want to be, and eventually find ways to transformation.
In chapter IV we will discuss some alternatives Allende offers to deal with women objectifications. The discussion will be divided into 3 divisions: firstly, to see how women characters enter self-discovery by asking who they really are, secondly, to see how women characters perform resistance toward objectification, and lastly, to see how women characters shift undesirable situation into victory.
These three steps are taken as response to women objectification. Three of them are placed within three different spectrums of heightened awareness suggested by
Rector: casual concern, interconnectedness and unity consciousness. Before discussing it, we need to see several important phases on the novel that explain the winding path of women to cope with objectification amid oppressive situation.
The first phase is the childhood of Eva’s mother, Consuelo, when she is found and brought up by the missionaries. As a girl, her presence is not important to the mission, she is disregarded. She is taken to Convent of Little Sister of
Charity when she is twelve. As the nuns do not see any enthusiasm of living in the convent, she is taken to Professor Jones mansion and spends the rest of her life as a servant there, in a place where she meets Indian gardener. (EL, 3-24).
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The second phase is the childhood of Eva with the ever-changing hardship circumstances after the death of Consuelo followed by the death of her first patron, Professor Jones. Since the mansion is taken over by church, all servants are dismissed, including Eva. She is taken by her madrina to new patrona, a hard- hearted lady with perpetual anger to the world and herself. In this place Eva meets
Elvira, the abuela, a servant who treats her like a daughter. (EL, 39-69)
The third phase is when finally patrona dismisses her and she starts moving from one patrona to another. One of patronas she can remember is Yugoslavian widow who treats Eva with kindness and certain tenderness. The Yogoslavian patrona discovers a recipe for a Universal Matter, a mixture of wet newspapers, unmilled flour, and dental cement that can be moulded like clay - in the future this
Universal Matter will take important part on revolution struggle. Fate brings Eva to a kind Turk man, Riad Halabi who takes Eva to a town called Aqua Santa, the first place called home for Eva. This is the first time when Eva does not feel like a servant. (EL, 93-123)
The fourth phase is a turning point of Eva’s life. It is the time when Eva learns to read from Inez. Once she knows how to read, he learns how to write. Eva expands her ability of inventing story. She uses it to relief Zulema from melancholy due to unhappy marriage with Riad Halaby and to help Rolf Carle to reconcile with his dreadful past. (EL, 125-152). At the end of the day, Eva brings most of the characters in the novel into intersection. Many people from the past meet again in interesting way. All these episodes expose the importance of women’s role in Eva’s life. It illustrates the encounter of different women
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characters who share the same struggle; surviving in high political pressure in the complexity of male-dominated society.
A. Self-discovery; internal and external factors in understanding women
identity.
Identity is never-ending definition during life. The construction of identity is ongoing process, a continuation. Identity cannot be constructed solitary but negotiated with other identities. Steph Lawrer states that:
Identity needs to be understood not as belonging ‘within’ the individual person, but as produced between person and within social relation…identity is socially produced, socially embedded, and work out in people’s everyday social lives.103
Here we see that identity construction involves a process in which individual’s experiences and ideas encounter others’ experiences ideas, within particular social contexts where these people interact in the basis of everyday social lives. The power relationship then cannot be excluded in this formation of identity. The identity embraces individual understanding to see him/herself and at the same time negotiates with the understanding of others, or community, toward him/herself.
Through Eva Luna, Allende provides space for discussing the significance of name and kinship as part of identity. Born into an obscure family, Eva investigates her kinship by collecting the memory of her bedtime stories from her mother. Kinship can be seen as external aspect to construct identity. A family relationship is a relationship of identity, as Schneider (1968:24) quoted by
Lawrer:
103 Steph Lawrer, Identity: Sociological Perspectives, 2nd (Malden: Polity Press, 2014) 19
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People who are blood relatives share a common identity…This is expressed as ‘being at the same flesh and blood’. It is believed in common biological constitution, and aspects like temperament, build, physiognomy and habits are noted as signs of this shared biological makeup, this special identity of relatives with each other. Children are said to look like their parents, or to “take after” one or another parent or grandparent; these are confirming signs of the common biological identity. A parent, particularly a mother, may speak of a child as “a part of me.
Eva Luna provides different perspectives about the correlation between kinship and identity. The only family she recognizes is Consuelo, her mother. Eva never meets her father but the memory of the Indian man invented by Consuelo eternally exists. It is carried forever by her name: Luna. The knowledge of her origin provides her primary stage of knowing herself and constructs her identity.
The memories, even the invented one, are selected and re-interpreted. The narration is assembled over the interpretation that is constantly being updated. A new narrative is also created to reconstruct memories and alter reality in the past.
For Eva, memory is not merely about the past but it determines her future; the way she comprehends and constructs the meaning of the past will conclude what she is in the future. Her present identity is a long continuum. To realize her past is to prepare her future. As she cannot relate with both her parents’ ancestor,
Eva ‘creates’ her origin. She uses the story invented by Consuelo about her anonymous Indian father and her maternal forebear; the Dutch grandfather. She invents her family tree:
…it had come from some oceangoing ancestor who had transferred to my blood his irrepressible longing for the sea. Since that corresponded to the legend of my Dutch grandfather, we explored the antique and second-hand shop until we found an oil painting of rocks, waves, gulls, and clouds,…, and hung in place of honour…I acquired a family to display on the
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wall…a grandfatherly type…I had my imposing family tree, we looked…for a picture of Consuelo...the picture of delicate and smiling young girl in a garden…dressed in lace and protected by parasol. (EL, 200)
The external aspect, kinship, is important for Eva on constructing her new identity. Eva puts family relationship which lies “at the heart of understanding of identity, through understandings of kin groups and one’s place within them”.104
However, as she cannot find her authentic kinship, she decides to ensemble knowledge and memory, to mix reality and to invent story to form her identity.
As important as the aforementioned external element identity construction, another element which is undeniably essential is the internal aspect; consciousness as a Subject. This discovery of self is begun with the question of “who am I?” The existence of a person has begun since they are born and the easiest way to acknowledge human is through their name. A name, then, is significant as it allows both the child and others to recognize the child existence. Name is basic element of identity. Name distinguishes a person from another person. In the novel, the significance of a name is clearly depicted in two important events: the first event is about the origin of Eva’s name. In the beginning of novel when the eponymous character opens the narrative by saying:
My name is Eva, which means "life," according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory (EL, 3).
104 Steph Lawrer, (2014), 50.
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The child is named by ‘Eva’ so that she “will love life”. Her mother adds a word ‘Luna’ after ‘Eva’ so that she carries knowledge of her origin. She is a daughter of an anonymous yellow eyes Indian gardener who “came from the place where the hundred rivers meet” and who “had grown up beneath a canopy of trees, and light seemed indecent to him” (EL, 3). In Eva’s body is flowing blood of Luna, which means the Children of the Moon. Luna is a name of Indian tribal where Eva’s father originated.
Native American Indians were deeply spiritual people who are dominated by rituals and beliefs in a spiritual connection with nature. They communicated their history, thoughts, ideas and dreams from generation to generation through symbols and signs. Their beliefs are reflected in various symbols they used and respected in daily life, such as sun symbol. The sun is of great important, even vital, to all of the Native Indian Americans tribes. Native American symbols are geometric portrayals of celestial bodies, natural phenomena and animal designs.
For additional information on this subject, refer to Star Chart & Astrology. The
Sun symbol was of great importance to all of the Native American Indian tribes.
The sun symbol is depicted in a variety of ways; three of the symbols are shown on the image. The sun was revered by the Indians as the provider of light, heat, and the facilitator of crops and the representation of growth. The rays of the sun signified the cardinal directions; North, South, East and West. The Sun Dance was a ceremonial dance performed by North American Plains Indians in honour of the sun at the summer solstice.105 It is revered as the source of life because it grows crops and plantation and provides light for human and other creatures on earth.
105 Anne Marriela Bacigalupo, Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche. (Austin:University of Texas Press, 2007), 24
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Luna tribe, the Moon’s children, do not need to look directly at the sky to have the power of the Sun because the Sun uses the Moon to reflect its light to the earth so that in the night, or “darkness”, there is still an opportunity to find the way using soft, dim light of the Moon. The Sun gives life and the Moon takes care of it. The
Moon is associated to Mother:
The moon gives power and voice… the moon is life and it defence people…the moon is saviour… the stars and the moon give power to heal…we, women are the earth, the moon, and live.106
Moon is a symbol of woman power. As one of children of the Moon, Eva demonstrates the power of women to love life, to live life and to survive in difficult situations. Eva’s name becomes more meaningful since her madrina, or godmother, asserts Consuelo, Eva’s mother, to give last name:
…Consuelo replied…Her name will be Eva, so she will love life. “And her last name?” “None. Her father’s name isn’t important.” “Everybody needs last name. Only dog can run around with one name.” “Her father belonged to the Luna tribe, the Children of the Moon. Let it be Luna, then, Eva Luna…” (EL, 20)
This quotation articulates that name signifies Eva’s existence as a Subject.
It gives her meaning, makes her presence in the world meaningful. When
Consuelo names her daughter Eva Luna, she has faith that her daughter is able to love and fight for life. As Moon is a powerful symbol of matriarchal power in
Latin America, Eva is expected to have strength as woman, as mother, as sister on overcoming life difficulties. Once the name is chosen, the destiny is created.
The second event on the novel which explains the significance of a name is about picking randomly the name of Consuelo. In contrary with Eva, Consuelo is
106 Anne Marriela Bacigalupo, (2007), 238.
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a name chosen randomly by priest without carefully considering its meaning. (EL,
4) However, name does not carry meaning unless one gives it. Even a simple name has its meaning. Edmun Husserl (1883, 1872), refers to John Stuart Mill, agrees that the essence of the meaning of name is located in their connotation.
Therefore, non-connotative name is meaningless.107
Despite the priests give Consuelo a name randomly, she makes the right time to signify her name; once she makes her name, at the same time her existence becomes meaningful. Consuelo means ‘to console, to offer a consolation’. Her name becomes meaningful through her righteous decision, when she offers herself to save the Indian gardener’s life.
Finding awareness that women are Subjects with authority to define their identity is a first step for women to refuse ideas of objectification. Under this awareness, women initiate to find out who they really are as a subject and among others. This awareness leads women to undertake responsibility to determine their journey of life and to set their destiny. Thus, the journey of Eva is a journey of self-discovery; a journey to find subjectivity.
In her journey, Eva embraces and respects life experiences of others. In this state of awareness, she is away from being self-centered. She uses her ability to notice, to pay attention, and to care about other women. Refering to Rector’s spectrum of human capability108, Eva achieves the level of awareness called casual concern. People in this level demonstrate the state of mild awareness and appreciation of human basic kinship with the rest of humanity regardless of
107 Edmun Husserl. “Investigation I: Expression and Meaning” in Adams, Hazard and Searle, Leroy. Critical Theory since Plato, 3rd ed.(Wadsworth Publishing: 2004) 784. 108 John M. Rector, The Objectification Spectrum, Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others, 228.
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others’ nationality, ethnicity, colour, sexual preference, political affiliation, or religious creed. However, it does not diminish or reduce the objectification nor the oppression toward women.
B. Silent resistance, emerging interconnectedness and unity consciousness
Eva’s nomadic life depicts long winding journey to self-discovery. It is filled with troubles and at the same time pleasures and it challenges people who undergo it to across the hazardous river to find safer place. It allows people to migrate from terrible to wonderful reality, as the author stated: “Being marginal is like being a new immigrant. If you can transform marginality into something positive, instead of dwelling on it as something negative, it's a wonderful source of strength”.
Eva is born out of ordinary social practice, out of matrimony. Her mother breaks the rules of religious and cultural norm that prohibits extramarital intercourse. She was carried with the very intention to rescue the Indian gardener’s life, the life which is more valuable than any cultural and religious systems in the society. Eva is delivered in the Consuelo’s spirits of salvation.
Women build interconnectedness by heightening awareness of the commonalities that all human beings share desire to love and be loved, to commit oneself to meaningful purposes. In this level of awareness women use their ability to interact to develop relationship among women and any potential support, to elevate their potential capacity to unshackle themselves from oppressive restraints. Within this spirits, women resistance is performed in creative ways without destroying life.
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Not every manifestation of objectification can be refused. Women do not always resist it, even though it is undesirable and oppressive. It is presented in fragment of Eva making decision to release from the control of Huberto Naranjo.
…take me with you. ”I can’t, Eva.” “Aren’t there women in the mountain?” “No, this is a man’s war”…”But how can you sacrifice both our life?” “It isn’t sacrifice. We’re building a new society; one day we’ll all be free and equal…” I realized that our problems were not related in any way to the fortunes of the guerrillas; even if he achieved his dream, there would be no equality for me. (EL, 207)
Eva recalls memory of the long-ago afternoon when she met Naranjo at the first time in a crowded plaza. It is when he invents the idea of machismo to her, an idea that as a male he is always able to direct his destiny and that because she has been born a girl, she was at a disadvantage: It is apparent that Naranjo maintains the idea that women lack of capacity to make decision; that women autonomy is denied. It triggers Eva’s anger, but still cannot lead her to refuse Naranjo’s repeated machismo idea. She still waits for Naranjo, even though the desire of resisting it already there in her mind:
His revolution would not change my fate in any fundamental way; under any circumstances, as long as I live I would still have to make my own way. Perhaps it was at that moment I realized that mine is a war with no end in view; I might as well fight it cheerfully or I would spend my life waiting for some distant victory in order to be happy. Yes, Elvira had been right: you have to be tough, life is a dogfight. (EL, 208)
This quotation shows that there is an awareness to survive and at the same time to resist the machismo idea. A resistance occurs when a person realizes that he or she is in an imperfect condition and that it is his or her God-forsaken right to fight the ideal situation. After undergoing various disadvantageous treatments,
Eva eventually develops her ability to deal with current reality but also increases
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her capacity to examine and consider her previous thought and feeling. She encourages herself to bring her dependence on Naranjo to an end by rethinking what he is to her.
Women imagine a situation in which they deserve to be treated as individuals and as a part of human society. One must surpass journey or pilgrimage into him/herself to find out who he/she actually is. Allende emphasizes that taking a journey of finding self, needs a courage: “because in my third novel, Eva Luna, Eva defeats the odds of her fate with generosity and candour; because these characters search for truth and have the courage to risk their lives”.109
Eva enters a kernel of consciousness that she is a Subject when she decides to stop being under other person’s control. She prefers to stand on her feet to gain self-determination; to write her own destiny. The one who stimulates her consciousness of being creator, makes her aware of the fact that she alone has the power to create everything is her Yugoslavian patrona:
I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted; not a parody of reality, like the musketeers and sphinxes of my Yugoslavian patrona, but a world of my own populated with living people, a world where I imposed the rules and could change them at will. In the motionless sands where my stories germinated, every birth, death, and happening depended on me. I could plant anything I wanted in those sands; I had only to speak the right word to give it life (EL, 167-168).
It is evidence that once women recognize themselves as Subject, they are able to identify and challenge the ideas of objectification. They refuse sexual
109 Elyse Crystall, Jill Kuhnheim, Mary Layoun, “An Interview with Isabel Allende”. Contemporary Literature. 33.4 (1992)
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abuse and being treated as tools to man’s purposes. They demand their experiences and feelings to be taken into account.
Eva narrates women’s desire or equality in human relationship, in any aspects; interpersonal and social. She also connects people and gives role to each of them. She considers Elvira who treats her kindly, patiently, and passionately as abuela, a grandmother. Eva finds a figure of sister on Mimi, a ‘woman’ to whom she can share very personal feelings and ideas truthfully. In spite of being a lover,
Naranjo urges to be protector for Eva and provides a figure of brother for Eva.
Riad depicts a figure of father to Eva, providing her with financial support, freedom to learn and explore her ability by giving her education. Eva brings together all good qualities of people and makes them valuable.
The concept of mother-daughter relationship obviously appears in Eva
Luna. It is depicted by Ines who provides Eva basic education. For Eva, reality itself can transform through the process of writing. She changes, recreates, shapes, and distorts reality through stories. She writes with experiences as self- contentment. She uses it as tool to barter, survive, escape, and comfort. Eva uses storytelling to emphasize and displace reality, “my stories…romantic ideas that distanced her from reality”. The stories and the imaginations are needed to make the reality more realistic and acceptable. The narratives are needed to conquer undesirable reality.
The teacher, Ines, at some point replaces Consuelo’s role in flourishing ideas of ‘crossing borders, showing Eva how to take step to go beyond boundaries. Ines is the first person who teaches Eva to read; something that
Consuelo is good at, but never met any chance to inherit it to her daughter before
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she passed away. Ines takes an important role in Eva’s life by finding and cultivating her potential, freeing her from illiteracy, widening the girl’s horizon to understand the world.
Mother-daughter relationship is also performed by Yugoslavian patrona, a widow who discovers a recipe of Universal Matter. Even though Eva cannot remember her name, but the memory of living with her modesty, having a good bed and opportunity to enjoy serials on the radio, is impossible to forget. This
Yugoslavian lady is the only patrona who treats Eva very well and teaches her a way of artist “copying everything imaginable, constructing a world of lies, and getting lost in it”. (EL, 97-98) Those all privileges resolve the longing to the presence of her mother.
Allende also portrays connection and solidarity among women who live in patriarchal circumstances. Mimi or Malesio, believes that women and men theoretically equal:
…they are models, on a reduced scale, of the universe, and therefore every occurrence on the astral plane is accompanied by manifestations at the human level, and each person experiences a relationship with a determined planetary order in accordance with the basic configuration associated with him or her from the day breath is drawn… (EL, 191)”
This idea is introduced by her meditation guru, Maharisi, whose philosophy guides Mimi’s life Mimi, who claims that he is a woman who is trapped in a man’s body. He believes that basically, man and women are created equally:
“Man and women, there is no difference between them in this theory. They are models, on reduced scale, of the universe, and therefore every occurrence on the astral plane is accompanied by manifestations at the human level, and each person experiences a relationship with determined planetary order in
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accordance with the basic configuration associated with him or her from the day the breath is drawn” (EL, 190-191)
This quotation expresses the ideal relationship between man and women which also represents ideal relationship between human and the rest parts of universe. As previously stated by Rector, the highest stage of apprehension is unity consciousness, human beings perceive themselves as parts of all existence in the universe and experience detachment or disinterestedness while they still continue to struggle with certain weaknesses and “blind spots” along their life.
This awareness is typified by acceptance of the present moment as it is. People in this level are capable of dealing with challenge mindfully, staying centered in the present experience, rather than being lost in thought or reacting to their feeling.
There are not many evidences in Eva Luna that relate to this concept. One that is obvious is the silence of Consuelo. Consuelo’s life happens to be significant to explain about silent resistance under the shade of religious oppression. For her silent disobedience, Mother Superior leads Consuelo by the hand to splendid French¬-style mansion on the outskirts of the city to work for a scientist expert in embalming cadaver, Professor Jones. Living as a servant in the professor’s house does not make Consuelo miss the Mission nor the Convent. She keeps being lack of concern about being Christian as the nun expects her to be.
Consuelo does not believe in original sin and baptism. When Eva was born,
Consuelo does not have any intention to christen her as normally done by parents in the Christian culture. She has her own picture of God. She refuses the tyrannical God the nuns preached to her. The only physical figure of Jesus she can remember from what she has learned in the Mission and Convent is represented
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by physical appearance of Professor Jones. However, she creates her own depiction about the nature and quality of God; she prefers more joyful, maternal, and compassionate characters of God.
By her silence and peacefulness, she develops great self-restrain at the same time the ability to sense and enjoy beauty, to be happy, and to expand her knowledge using the professor’s books. In the middle of her routine works, she uses her solitude time inventing stories to create her own world and gain enjoyment amidst harsh life:
Silence allows women “to escape an unbearable situation and provides (them) a space within the patriarchal society in which imagination can be given free reign. Imagination, writing, the supernatural, and silence are tools which these female characters use to obtain certain autonomy or control over their destinies”. 110
To deal with disadvantageous situation, sometimes the best resistance is to remain silent. Silence presents certain level of peace that to some extent becomes a source of alternatives ways to survive. Silence invites solution from within.
Using the power of imagination and playing with words, Both Consuelo and Eva carry out silent way to survive.
C. Re-narrating women identity, overcoming undesirable situation
The third alternative to cope with women objectification is re-narrating women identity. Using the power of imagination, Eva carries out silent way to survive and builds her own narrative, determining her own history. Eva Luna provides an illustration of beautiful encounter of some different women characters
110Alina Camacho-Gingerich. “In Search of the Feminine Voice: Feminist Discourse in Contemporary Latin American Literature”, 7.
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who one way or another share the same struggle; surviving in high political pressure in the complexity of male-dominated culture, experiences many faces of objectifications. The encounter from one person to another is meaningful for Eva.
One of the influential people is her teacher, Ines, the person who engrains important query about reality.
The schoolteacher Ines suggested I write them down in a notebook. I began spending part of the night writing, and I enjoyed it so much…I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn’t an unformed and gelatinous substance only half captured by my senses. There was no prove that everyone perceived it in the same way. (EL, 167)
This evidence explains that Eva starts realizing that as human she has power to construct her own reality. By reading and writing, Eva uses words to understand reality and to create ideal reality at the same time. She can ‘change’, undesirable situation using the power of words. Words become tools to survive. It reflects the unvoiced reality which perhaps cannot be easily voiced using common practical language. It is a silence which attempts to speak
Using her expansive imagination and profusion of words, she tells and writes stories. She invents narrative and redefines who exactly women are and what they deserve in life, individually and socially by acknowledging her dream, needs, and feelings to respect her personal entity. This capacity proves that women are subjects with ability to cope with various oppressive situations and to overcome many faces of objectifications as basis of oppression. When Eva writes, she shifts to be an autonomous being that has full authority to determine her own destiny. As a result, she takes complete responsibility on becoming a person, a part of community, and a member of humanity.
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The most influential teacher is her mother who is naturally a story teller.
Eva lives with a legacy from her mother. She maintains the magical dimension of having good story in uneasy reality:
When she talked about the past, or told her stories, the room filled with light; the walls dissolved to reveal incredible landscapes, palaces crowded with unimaginable objects, faraway countries…She placed at my feet the treasures of the Orient, the moon, and beyond. She reduced me to the size of an ant so I could experience the universe from that smallness; she gave me wings to see it from the heavens; she gave me the tail of a fish so I would know the depths of the sea. (EL, 21)
The ability to absorb, string and grow words provide her possibility to cross over her limitation of knowing the world outside the wall and broaden her mind to accept her situation and at the same time triumph over various difficulties in her life. Her ability to combine imagination and reality into narratives enables her to expand her perspective and create reality beyond what common people can see.
Eva uses narration to connect and unite people, to reconcile with their past misery, and to discover that human being possess all good traits and are able to cultivate those qualities from within. Eva courageously steps out of bitter life events.
When she was telling a story, her characters peopled my world…She manufactured the substance of her own dreams, and from those materials constructed a world for me. Words are free, she used to say, and she appropriated them; they, were all hers. She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey, through life less trying (EL, 21)
There are always ideas to release, once it is silenced, it attempts to find way to speak. Silence is a trap; burden, prison, and something which waits to break.
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Words are the way to release, to liberate. Eva’s aptitude of inventing story becomes greater when eventually she can read. When Ines, school teacher paid by
Ryad Halaby to teach Eva reading, gives her first book of A Thousand and One
Tales of the Arabian Nights, she starts realizing the magic of words to transform unpleasant reality into amusing one or vice versa. She begins to question
“whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn’t an unformed and gelatinous substance”. She challenges the idea of living in “absolute isolation” due to the differences on how each person perceives the reality and how they fail to find mutual understanding in seeing the same colour or hearing the same sounds by inventing reality:
If that were true, each of us is living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me…At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me (EL, 167-168).
She starts from the very beginning, the ability to transform her life from an unfortunate orphan to be a successful adult woman one day, through the power of narrative. Women can be anyone they want to be. When she starts to write, she starts to speak about the world she wants it to be. The aim is to ‘speak for freedoms which are swallowed up, masked and unavailable’.111
Eva composes her own history through configuring events stored in the space of experience, in its memory. She did not just choose particular events considered important in her life but also gives a new meaning to each event before woven into the story of her life. Eva makes her presence in the present always
111 Jean Paul Sartre. “Writing, Reading, and the Public” in Walder, Dennis, Literature in The Modern World, Critical Eassays and Documents (New York: Oxford University Press: 1990), 83.
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unknowable through justifying her history, the reasons are found in the past that makes it as it is today.
Eva’s decision to leave unproductive days of being factory worker and to start writing story is a crucial turning point. Her silence is broken since the writing process. The words are produced freely. The unbearable situation is relieved. The unkind reality is shifted into satisfying story. The imagination allows the realism mingles with the magical events. It is explained in the way she writes:
I just do what I can. Reality is a jumble we can’t always measure or decipher, because everything is happening at the same time. While you and I are speaking here, behind your back Christopher Columbus is inventing America, and the same Indians that welcome him in the stained-glass window are still naked in a jungle a few hours from this office, and will be there a hundred years from now. I try to open a path through that maze, to put a little order in that chaos, to make life more bearable. When I write, I describe life as I would like it to be (EL, 266).
Eva combined her unbridled imagination with real life experience and events both of hers and others to develop narrative of hers at the same time to put a positive spin on the situation. Using the selected memories from thorny past life,
Eva Luna sets up a remarkable chain of events. She invents happy ending along with harmful realities to turn the mourning into blessing. She tries to let go the tragic loss of life and chooses to celebrate small victories in the midst of difficulties. She deals with the oppression using the power of narrative.
When Eva writes the script of telenovela, she tries to deliver her understanding toward people’s experiences which she considered as important.
However, her ideas are negotiated due to safety of people behind the stories; one of them is Comandante Rogelio, pseudo-name of Huberto Naranjo. The
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negotiation includes the powerful and dangerous man, General Tolomeo
Rodriguez, and the very important broadcasting man, Senor Aravena. It is reflected in the dialog which involves the General, Eva, and Aravena:
“I see that you are better informed than I am. Let’s not get into discussion of military secrets, Eva. I hope you will not force me to take certain measures – just follow my suggestion. … how does one write?” “Where do you get your ideas?’ “From things that are happening and from things that happened before I was born – from newspaper, from what people tell me” (EL, 266-267)
This quotation describes how the General tries to subjugate Eva’s creativity and autonomy to tell the truth in her own perspective. He also negates the role and right of women on taking part in the formation of truth is society. Having the ability to read and write, Eva is strongly devoted to the ideals of non-violent ways to respond to oppression and generate social progress. However, it is not an easy situation for Eva to deal with powerful authority, in this case is military. To understand the situation of the writer, how a writer struggles with dilemma before producing narrative, we can use Jean Paul Sartre’s significant questions:
First question is ‘Do you have anything to say?…The prose-writer, then, is an informant who masters the speech, takes hold of his or her words. When the writer writes, he or she must have something significant to deliver to the readers. Second question is ‘What would happen if everybody read what I wrote?’ By questioning it, the writer at the same time inquiring of what aspect of the world he or she wants to disclose or what kind of change they may bring into the world through the work Third question is ‘For whom does one write?’ There is almost always particular aim of writing during writing. One of the aims is ‘speak for freedoms which are swallowed up, masked and unavailable’. 112
112 Jean Paul Sartre. “Writing, Reading, and the Public” in Walder, Dennis, Literature in The Modern World, Critical Eassays and Documents (New York: Oxford University Press: 1990), 83.
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This quotation explain that in dealing with dilemma, a writer should set a mental state to make a discernment. A writer need to determine which part of narrative is able to reveal and how to form it. The dilemma experienced by Eva can be found in real situation. On the one hand, a writer has to take part in social transformation. On the other hand, he or she has to ensure that what she does will not harm her or others. Become a women writer even harder. They have to face the reality that in patriarchal society the narrative belongs to those who in power, men. This situation explains that in patriarchal society where telling truth is a domain of the powerful man, it is big challenge for woman writer to take part on determining what kind of narrative is valuable for the society, as stated by
Allende:
Until now, men have decided the destiny of this suffering planet, imposing ambition, power and individulism as virtues. ...These values are also present in literature. Critics, most of them men, as you probably can guess, have determined what is good in literature-what is valuable or artistic, according to our aesthetic, intellectual and moral pattern-leaving aside the feminist half of the human race, whose opinions on this or any other matter don't interest them.113
Allende sees that women writer need to be brave on delivering their opinion and provides alternative narratives for the society. Women should empower their ability to struggle using their own language, to relate it to the values and traditions of their own society. What is written by women will be judged under the judgment of men. Women’s voice or expression challenges the mainstream voice of manhood. Women’s truth is challenged. In this situation a women writer needs to establish their own autonomy and authority as providers of alternative truth.
113 Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, eds. “Feminism in Literature,” A Gale Critical Companion 5 (2005). 41
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Women writing have to stimulate people’s imagination to develop their critical abilities and increase their emotional awareness. It takes courage to come to a conclusion that “I think it's time to revise this situation. But it is not the Old Guard who will do it. It will be done by women…who have nothing to lose and therefore no fear.”114
The formation and definition about truth and power are also constructed through literary criticism. We can study how the society ‘defining the truth’ by following some ideas and argumentation provided by, for example, Foucault. In
Truth and Power Foucault explains about truth as the product of power relations and of the system in which power is distributed and flows. Truth is centred on the form of scientific discourse and the institution which produces it. It is subject to constant economic and political incitement. It is the object of immense diffusion and consumption. It is produced and transmitted under the control of great political and economic apparatuses. It is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation.
The essential political problem for the intellectual is not a matter of arising people’s awareness or of changing their consciousness against the political, economic and institutional regime, but more a matter of guiding the process of the production of the truth. 115 Speaking of political culture, production of truth is institutionalized by who are in power. When the history written in the point of view of man in power contains untruth, the works of writer have opportunity to speak truth from different point of view.
114 Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, eds. “Feminism in Literature,” 41. 115 Michel Foucault. “Truth and Power” in Adams, Hazar and Searle, Leroy, Critical Theory since Plato, 3rd ed.(Wadsworth Publishing: 2004) p. 1279
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The novel also shows us that creating new realities as she wishes by selecting and rearranging the realities helps people to see the present is seen as a result of the ability to adapt to an unpleasant experience. Using the narrative to break the silence is a way to survive, as stated by Allende that putting together the words from preserved memory into written narrative helping her “to understand what is really inside each human being and each event”. She uses power of a story and magical quality of the words to make some events necessary, to impose truth or simply to share ideas. Narration is like a window:
…open to an infinite landscape... we can put all the interrogations, we can register the most extravagant, evil, obscene, incredible or magnificent facts, which, in Latin America, are not hyperbole, because that is the dimension of our reality…we can give an illusory order to chaos. We can find the key to labyrinth of history. We can make excursion into the past, to try to understand the present and dream the future…help us to decode the mysteries of our world and discover our true identity. 116
Eva depicts the importance of building personal narrative to put her into history. She tries to know who exactly women are and what they deserve in life, individually and socially. It includes acknowledgment for their dreams, needs, and feelings to respect their personal entity. Using her expansive imagination and profusion of words, she tells and writes stories. She invents narratives. These narratives eventually help her and people surround her to deal with misery.
As a summary, the findings in chapter IV show us that there are four ways to cope with women objectifications provided by Allende in Eva Luna, they are women self-discovery, women silent resistance, and re-narrating women identity.
116 Allende, Isabel. “Writing as an Act of Hope.” In Path of Resistence: Art and Craft of the Political Novel, edited by William Zinsser, pp.39-63. Boston: houghton Miffin, 1089. In Bomarito Jessica and W. Hunter, Jeffrey. ed. Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion, Vol. 5. (2005), Farmington Hill, Thompson and Gale. pp. 41
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Women’s self-discovery includes internal and external factors to understand women identity; consciousness as a Subject and kinship.
First step to cope with objectification is women’s self-discovery. It begins with the question of “who am I?” Having name is the beginning, and then signifying it through righteous decision will make women existence meaningful.
The important thing of this two ways of self-discovery is that women find way to understand and to see him/herself and at the same time negotiates with the understanding of others, or community, toward him/herself. Tracing kinship itself is a metaphor to reconcile with the past and at the same time to accept the present.
The second coping mechanism is silent resistance which is taken under the spirit of interconnectedness and unity consciousness. Beginning with an awareness of the commonalities that all human beings share desire to love and be loved, women use their ability to interact, to develop relationship among them, to elevate their potential capacity, and to unshackle themselves from oppressive restraints. Within this spirits, women resistance is performed in creative ways without destroying life by supporting and taking care of each other.
The third way to cope with objectification appearing on the novel is re- narrating women identity to cope with undesirable oppressive situation. It is started by realizing that as human she has power to construct her own reality. By reading and writing, women use words to understand reality and to create desirable reality at the same time. Through re-narrating narrative and formatting it into telenovela, Eva promotes a creative way to reveal and refract social reality. It helps the society to see alternative truth and at the same time develops critical abilities and to increase emotional awareness. Regardless of dilemma she has
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undergone, Eva shows that as woman she has right and that she is able to play important role in seeking and constructing truth together with the society.
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CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
Patriarchy, women’s oppression, and women’s objectification are interrelated. In patriarchal circumstances, women are oppressed in many different forms. The oppression is rooted from the idea which sees women as object; women are seen as inferior beings, less than men, even less than human.
Objectification, or treating women as merely object, manifests in several different features. Martha C. Nussbaum characterizes the features as: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity. Meanwhile, Rector suggests that the objectification features can be present in different levels of misapprehension of what human beings in their totality. These levels of misapprehension, i.e. casual indifference, derivatization and dehumanization, also called as objectification spectrum, refer to the level of intensity and potential for contributing to undesirable and destructive acts of violence.
Objectification can be experienced by anyone, regardless of sex, gender, age, race, and other aspects of human identity, in patriarchal society, women are prone to be objectified. However, in patriarchal society women are placed in difficult situation. Their opportunity to express, to gain self-determination, to make decision for themselves, and even to acknowledge their needs, desire and identity are limited. Patriarchal society facilitates greater role of men than of women in many areas.
In chapter III, we have discovered several features of women’s objectification in Eva Luna: denial of autonomy and subjectivity, instrumentality,
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and ownership. These features can be seen in three different events in the novel: slavery of women, sexualisation of women, and religious’ ignorance toward women. The first event, slavery of women is depicted by the story of Consuelo,
Eva, and Madrina in Professor Jones’ mansion. Slavery exploits women and at the same time prolongs and remains them living in poverty. Women’s bodies, abilities, thoughts and experiences which are supposed to be their authority, are considered as commodity.
Under white supremacy, indigenous women are placed in a class within a class; they are exploited due to not only their race, but also their sexuality. They are avoided from accesses to life resources such as education and proper work.
Furthermore, they lose power to take control of their own destiny. As stated by
Nancy Holmstrom that “oppression is not merely a product of patriarchal structure per se but related to capitalist modes of production”, women’s oppression creates unequal relationship between men who are powerful and women who are economically powerless.
The second event is sexual objectification or sexualization in which men’s superiority evokes women’s inferiority due to denial of subjectivity. Women’s feelings and experiences are ignored. Women subjectivity are reduced to merely sexual objects as depicted by Senor Aravena who tends to see women under men’s looking glass and to consider them as the projection of men’s desire, as men’s sexual objects. A man who is like Aravena performs sexual objectification in the form of starring, evaluating, and commenting on women bodies, and further, wanting to touch parts of them to fulfil his sexual desire. Women perceive such male gaze differently. Some women tend to determine what it means to be a
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woman and make the bodies kinds of project. Through Zulema, Riad Halabi’s wife, the novel explains that under the ideas of self-sexualization, women see their body, beauty and sexiness as means to attract men. Zulema looks for information from other women, in this case is Eva, about how attractive she is to his affair,
Kamal, Halabi’s cousin.
The feeling of inferiority is resulted from the denial of autonomy where women are treated as lacking of self-determination. It is clearly depicted on the prior relationship between Eva and Naranjo, and between Eva and Colonel
Rodriguez. Both men show their superiority to control women by taking advantages from their higher position in society, like Naranjo as Guerrilla fighter, and in work place and like Rodriguez as Eva’s patron in factory. Naranjo refuses the idea that women have right to participate in the struggle.
The third event is the subtle level of objectification occurring in the form of ignorance performed by religious institution which shows a tendency to deny, to allow, or to tolerate unexpected situation by not giving any attention or pretending to not knowing it. The novel provides evidence that the religious institution denies the subjectivity of indigenous girls by christening them without taking their experiences and feelings into account. These girls are taken to Missionary or
Convent to be converted for being poor and originally non-white so that they can be “educated’ and “civilized” through Christian education. They are not allowed to maintain their own tradition, e.g. by cutting the “satanic tail”, and their own conception about God. Christianity is used for subjugating indigenous especially women.
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The novel also provides three different faces of patriarchy. The journey of
Consuelo, Eva, and Madrina in Profesor Jones’ mansion tells about women’s life predicament under white patriarchal supremacy which shows imbalanced power relation between elite-whites and poor indigenous, especially women. While
Relationship between Eva and Naranjo, Rodriguez, and Aravena represents patriarchy of their own countrymen which places women away from the right to be part of social struggle. Even when women can economically enter public sphere as depicted by Eva working as secretary of a factory, women are politically placed within domestic sphere. The dehumanization undergone by Frau Carle tells about patriarchy within family, conducted by husband over wife and children. It is a reflection of patriarchal unjust relationship in a smallest unit of society.
In chapter IV, we found that there are three ways to cope with women’s objectification offered by Allende. This situation is depicted by the phases of
Eva’s journey dealing with life predicament: self-discovery, silent resistance, and re-narrating identity to regain subjectivity. Women’s self-discovery is aligned with the process of identity construction which includes two basic elements; external and internal. The discovery of self begins with the question of “who am
I?” This self-discovery occurs through looking over all experiences, interpreting them, and giving them meaning.
Silent resistance is performed within the spirits of building interconnectedness. Within the awareness that all human beings share desire to love and be loved, to commit oneself to meaningful purposes, women use their ability to interact, to develop relationship among women and any potential support, to elevate their potential capacity, and to unshackle themselves from
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oppressive restraints. The spirits lead women to resist using creative ways without destroying life. The novel shows how mother-daughter relationship and sisterhood are successful on providing supporting system among them. Women make themselves caregivers one to another.
By re-narrating women identity, women are able change perspective to perceive undesirable reality. Inventing stories helps Eva to conquer life difficulties. The undesirable realities are displaced and replaced by new way to perceive the dark side of past life. Using the power of imagination, Eva carries out silent way to survive and builds her own narrative, and determines her own history. Using her expansive imagination and profusion of words, she tells and writes stories. She invents narrative and redefines who exactly women are and what they deserve in life, individually and socially by acknowledging her dreams, needs, and feelings to respect her personal entity.
The novel depicts the importance of building personal narrative to put women into history and to make women completely exist as human being. By constructing her narrative, Eva tries to gain her authority to determine her life destiny. Through self-narrative, women are able to preserve experiences from the past and from the world mysteries in order to understand the present. This understanding will enrich women quest to construct her identity formation in the future.
However, reality is not as simple as a story. In fact, dealing with patriarchy, women’s oppression, and women’s objectification is long and winding journey.
Objectification seems hard to be defeated. Women need to continue resisting, fighting against the battle, as the patriarchy, the women’s oppression and
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objectification continue to occur in the one or another way. Women’s effort to cope with objectification seems never end, and it requires ability to always adapt to continuously-changing patriarchal situation. Finally, through the analysis of
Allende’s Eva Luna, this research tries to encourage women to be persistent and tireless on finding creative ways to deal with various manifestations of women’s objectification. .
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