Hey guys!
IT'S BEEN AGES SINCE I DON'T WRITE A POST HERE!
I will remedy with some new posts, I hope I'll find the time for everything.
Today's post will be about a topic of which I mentioned in an earlier post. The topic is: the education of children and the difference between boys and girls.
Today I will talk about it in a different way, last time I used a book, to explain this situation, but now i will use a short story by Jean Rhys, that some of you may know by Wide Sargasso Sea, review of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The title of the short story is "The Doll" and I will do a summary and try to give my interpretation.
The characters of the story are two young sisters, one older than the other, and their parents.
The two sister received from their Irish granny two dolls, a dark one and a fair one.
The older sister, who is the narrator of the story, thought that she wanted the dark doll as she had never done before, but her sister grab her first.
Even if she tried to take it back, she couldn't because her parents came to rescue the younger sister and to teach the same life lesson to their daughter "don't be selfish, don't be silly, or you won't be loved in your life", in a nutshell.
But she was just a girl, and to prove that the fair doll wasn't what she wanted, angry like ever, smashed her face.
Her parents were really angry with her even if they didn't know the real reason why she did it. But with threat and too big words for a child, made her promise that she wouldn't do that anymore.
The only person with whom she could really talk was her aunt, Jane. With her she could cry and she decided to bury the doll in the garden.
So the message of this story isn't as simple as it seems, infact in this story the narrator/the main character has an education which impose her to behave in a certain way or to be a certain kind of girl, otherwise she wouldn't be loved.
But the girl in the story isn't that kind of girl, she is a bit aggressive, a bit naughty too, but not wicked, because in the end we see that she regret for her bad action.
We have similar situationeven nowdays, when we are supposed to be more openminded, instead we keep on treating girls like the ones who must work in the house, we give them dolls or toy kitchens, or even pink clothes; and we keep on supposing that boys are the stronger who mustn't cry or be sensitive but ought to be the ones who will work heavier in the future. So if we don't get out of the stereotypes, if we don't stop teaching children them, we will never progress.
