Friday, December 5, 2008
Holiday
For now, this post will be short and sweet. I want to look into gender issues in Holiday and how they pertain, yet again, to their social constructions. Here we have Ottilie, a character who undoubtedly calls into question traditional gender boundaries, especially in appearance. Appearance wise, Ottilie is essentially genderless. How does this genderless-ness fit into the ways in which the Muller family treats her? I see the Muller family as a metaphor for society, which in essence, they are (I mean, there are a lot of them...) How do social constructs appear in Holiday, and more importantly how do they defined characters, especially in relation to gender?
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Interesting, since the narrator seems to be genderless. Actually, the only explicit reference we have to the narrator's gender is in a passage that deals specifically with gender roles: the narrator notes that because "I was a stranger and a guest, [I] was seated on the men's side of the table." This muted reference to gender follows an interesting line about the women standing behind their husbands' chairs to serve them food, "for three generations in this country had not made them self-conscious or disturbed their ancient customs." the apparently genderless quality in the narrator may be an interesting comment on the alienation a woman can sometimes feel from her femininity when "ancient customs" are condemned--the true misogynies are hidden under modern denial of superficial ones (like Camilo of "Theft," "by a series of compromises had managed to make effective a fairly complete set of smaller courtesies, ignoring the larger and more troublesome ones").
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