Week 12: Reading Gender Paper

The play The Eternal Feminine, by Rosario Catellanos, is about a woman named Lupita who goes into the beauty shop in Mexico City one day to get her hair done for her wedding.  While she is there a salesman sells the owner a device that clips onto the hair dryer and forces the women to dream instead of think.  The company has invented this device because when women sit under the hair dryer for a long time they begin to get bored and when they get bored they begin to think.  The salesman says, “thinking itself is bad…it must be avoided”.   The company believes that the worst thing that a woman can do is to think.  This is the first time that gender can be read into this play.  The salesperson is making the woman seem like her only role should be to be pretty and to obey her husband’s orders.  

            After the device is installed, Lupita sits under the hair dryer and begins to fall asleep and start dreaming.  Her first main dream is of her honeymoon.  This scene is also the first encounter with her husband, Juan, and it greatly portrays the inequality between women and men, especially in Mexico.  In her dream, after Juan and Lupita get married and finish having sex, Juan begins:

“Juan:  …and now the sixty-four thousand dollar question.  Did you like it?

Lupita:  Like it? Me? A decent girl?  Who do you take me for?

Juan:  You didn’t like it?

Lupita: It seemed repugnant, disgusting

Juan:  Thanks Lupita.  I knew you weren’t going to fail me in the moment of truth.  Thank you

Lupita:  I’ll never let you come near me again

Juan:  Not even if I force you?

Lupita:  Would you be capable of that?

Juan:  naturally.  What would stop me?  I have the strength and I have the right.  Besides, you vowed to obey me before the altar.”  (Castellanos pg. 279)

This conversation demonstrates how much power the man has over the woman.  The woman is supposed to succumb to the man.  She is not supposed to enjoy sex because if she did enjoy it then the man wouldn’t be in power anymore.  He even tells her that he will force her to have sex with him now since she didn’t enjoy it.  By the man forcing the woman to have sex this gives him the idea of having power over her and controlling her.  The woman must consider herself as property to the man and obey what he says.  As the conversation goes on Lupita tells Juan how he hurt her during intercourse and that he should have pity on her, only for him to reply, “I won’t have pity on you even if you beg me.” 

            It is interesting to compare this scene with the chapter in The F Word called “The changing shape of relationships”.  This chapter talks about how many women stay single, or live with their partners but not get married.  It also talks about how women have sex before marriage and how many more women are getting divorced.  This is how life between a man and women is becoming, but this is contradictory to what Lupita had to go through.  In Lupita’s time and culture it was natural for the woman to surrender to the man, but in this time in American culture, a woman very rarely submits herself to the man in the relationship.