...Woman is Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, the one who receives and endures. In songs and tales, the young man sets off to seek the woman; he fights against dragons, he combats giants; she is locked up in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, chained to a rock, captive, put to sleep: she is waiting…”
- Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
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Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is often touted as one of the greatest feminist manifestos ever written. In it, she inspires woman to develop and wield their creativity and, through their written work, subvert the patriarchal domination of the fictional (and real) world. She argues that women need a room of one’s own, as well as financial freedom, in order to write fiction. Her plea is inspiring and revolutionary, yes, but Woolf neglects to address one major issue: women of less fortune and opportunities as the ones given to her as a white woman living in contemporary times.
And, unfortunately, women of these less-than-auspicious backgrounds and circumstances particularly abound in literature.
In Lisa See’s novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, two young Chinese girls, Lily and Snow Flower, paired together as laotongs, which means “old same.” This bond, created by the parents of the two girls, “[lasts] their entire lives… To have a laotong was very special indeed” (See 22). These matches are made to ensure not only a female support system for the young girls, but also for families to achieve higher societal standings. As such, Lily’s family agrees to match their daughter with Snow Flower, after hearing the other family comes from a much better social background than their own. Girls are used as commodities throughout the entire novel, “a means to make a profit” (See 23).
In the novel, a great deal of focus is put in the process of footbinding, a cruel but culturally-tolerated procedure of binding a young girl’s foot in order to achieve a perfect “lily flower”, a pair of beautiful and tiny feet which were greatly admired and desired in China. Lily explains the novel that “the poorest girls don’t have their feet bound at all. We know how they end up… sold as servants…” (See 17). The more perfect the feet, the better the chances of marrying into a respectable, wealthy family. During the lengthy process, in which toes are broken and curled into the foot, the girls are forced to reside solely in an upstairs room. Here they wait until their feet become completely “set” and there they stay until they are married off, never traveling much outside their own home. Lily speaks about this confinement when she says “I knew that men rarely entered the women’s chamber… Whether you are rich or poor, emperor or slave, the domestic sphere is for women and the outside sphere is for men. Women should not pass beyond the inner chambers in their thoughts or in their actions” (See 24).
While footbinding is not practiced today – it was outlawed in 1912, even though some survivors of the practice are still alive today (Lim 1) – the social and sexual restrictions placed on women remain much the same. Only the bindings have changed. Women today aren’t breaking and binding their feet, but they are breaking their bank accounts and binding themselves to a rigid ideal of what is “hot” or “normal” through the use of cosmetics, plastic surgery, gym equipment, diet fads, weight-loss pills, tanning salons, etc, etc. Susan Bordo speaks about this idea in “Unbearable Weight,” arguing that “our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, femininity” (2240). While we as Westerns may regard the Eastern practice of footbinding as cruel, unnatural and highly grotesque, it may be wise to turn that critical eye on what women are doing to their bodies today. One look at some of the Playboy models or adult-film stars – even just opening up a copy of People magazine – shows us that the processes may change, but the ideology behind it remains the same: “our contemporary aesthetic ideal for women, an ideal whose obsessive pursuit has become the central torment of many women’s lives” (Bordo 2241).
Girls are taught from a young age – whether it’s directly from a parent or through immersion into today’s sexually-charged media – that they should aspire to occupy a particular role: namely, that of a wife. As de Beauvoir says “…the supreme necessity for woman is to charm a masculine heart; this is the recompense all heroines aspire to, even if they are intrepid, adventuresome; and only their beauty is asked of them in most cases” (305). Lily and Snow Flower, intelligent, daring and resourceful young women, are desired only for their beauty (or rather the beauty of their feet) and for their ability to produce children (or more specifically, male children). They suffer through the anguish of footbinding. They wait until a marriage match is made for them, with the family’s social standing the most important concern, with no regard to how they feel themselves. They produce children and sit quietly until they die, becoming “a totally other-oriented emotional economy” (Bordo 2245). While Lily enjoys a relatively happy marriage with her husband later in her life, Snow Flower is abused, mistreated and emotionally neglected at the hands of her husband and in-laws. But neither girl escapes the confines, whether physical or emotional, that bind women in a patriarchal society.
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de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Ed. Constance Borde and Shelia Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., 2009. 305. Google Book Search. Web. 16 May 2011.
Bordo, Susan. “Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.” The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, 2nd. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 2240-2254. Print.
Lim, Louisa. “Painful Memories for China’s Footbinding Survivors.” NPR.org. NPR, 19 March 2007. Web. 16 May 2011.
See, Lisa. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. New York: Random House, Inc. 2009. Print.
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