Michelle Cliff's Rebel Women
In Jennifer Springer’s article titled “Reconfigurations of Caribbean History: Michelle Cliff’s Rebel Women”, she describes how Clare’s rebelliousness stems from previous women in the past such as Nanny and Inez. Springer states, “In the midst of imperial exploitation and hardships, women like Inez were plotting for the future; instead of feeding into their oppression” (Springer 51). Here Springer is saying that Inez did not want to accept the ways of society, but she rejected society in order to be different. These are the same qualities seen in Clare. In chapter 15, Clare kills the hog, “Here she was on her way to kill something wild—which had been wild for twenty years—and she had not really thought about it at all. Not the fact of the killing,
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Beauvoir suggests, “To pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being” (1266). She characterizes women to show the significance and importance of the female, although she has been considered the Other. It is the Woman versus the Other of the man. However, Clare does not want to be accepted as the other without an interchange. She does not become complicit, but she fights against it. In actuality, Clare breaks free from femininity and becomes a subject rather than an object.
Like Cliff, Scottish born Jackie Kay also presents the same issues in her 1984 novel —“Trumpet.” “Trumpet” is a perfect novel to address society’s view of male and female through the protagonist, Joss Moody. Joss is a famous jazz trumpet player who is anatomically a woman but passes as a man. The people in society does not openly judge Joss, but through the employees of society it is seen. Kay explores this perception through the doctor:
She got her red pen out from her doctor’s bag. What she thought of as her emergency red pen. She crossed ‘male’ out and wrote ‘female’ in her rather bad doctor’s handwriting. She looked at the word ‘female’ and thought it wasn’t quite clear enough. She crossed that out, tutting to herself, and printed ‘female’ in large childish letters …show more content…
The doctor represents society; she is the voice for society and the red pen symbolizes anger and pain. Moody has declared and accepted who he is and that is a man, but the doctor and the color of that ‘red pen’ represents society’s rejection. Society says because Moody was born a female that he will always be considered a female. Every choice in this novel has, again, been eliminated. In “The Power of the Ordinary Subversive in Jackie Kay’s “Trumpet”, Tracy Hargreaves argues that Kay’s novel “can be seen as part of a [parodies and painfully exposes the discontinuities of dominant sex-gender system]” (2). Hargreaves’ article represents the claim that the red pen is, in fact, a representation of society’s judgment. Hargreaves herself
Beauvoir suggests, “To pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being” (1266). She characterizes women to show the significance and importance of the female, although she has been considered the Other. It is the Woman versus the Other of the man. However, Clare does not want to be accepted as the other without an interchange. She does not become complicit, but she fights against it. In actuality, Clare breaks free from femininity and becomes a subject rather than an object.
Like Cliff, Scottish born Jackie Kay also presents the same issues in her 1984 novel —“Trumpet.” “Trumpet” is a perfect novel to address society’s view of male and female through the protagonist, Joss Moody. Joss is a famous jazz trumpet player who is anatomically a woman but passes as a man. The people in society does not openly judge Joss, but through the employees of society it is seen. Kay explores this perception through the doctor:
She got her red pen out from her doctor’s bag. What she thought of as her emergency red pen. She crossed ‘male’ out and wrote ‘female’ in her rather bad doctor’s handwriting. She looked at the word ‘female’ and thought it wasn’t quite clear enough. She crossed that out, tutting to herself, and printed ‘female’ in large childish letters …show more content…
The doctor represents society; she is the voice for society and the red pen symbolizes anger and pain. Moody has declared and accepted who he is and that is a man, but the doctor and the color of that ‘red pen’ represents society’s rejection. Society says because Moody was born a female that he will always be considered a female. Every choice in this novel has, again, been eliminated. In “The Power of the Ordinary Subversive in Jackie Kay’s “Trumpet”, Tracy Hargreaves argues that Kay’s novel “can be seen as part of a [parodies and painfully exposes the discontinuities of dominant sex-gender system]” (2). Hargreaves’ article represents the claim that the red pen is, in fact, a representation of society’s judgment. Hargreaves herself