Female Characters Overcoming Stereotypes
Female Characters Overcoming Stereotypes
For females to overcome the stereotypes, oversimplified description of a group of people, from their particular society that had cast on them, it’s like having a revolution within them. Stereotypes are created by people that are described with oversimplified descriptions to a group of people. For instance being as Taiwanese, we stereotypes Americans as outgoing or friendly. By looking at the traditions of the stereotypes of different societies from a female side of the world, general stereotypes for a woman would be submissive, passive, self-sacrificing, and lack in self-confidence. After reading all the stories, I chose three stories that contain female characters in which they overcame their stereotypes and traditions from their particular society, the stories are as follow: Leela from “Hindus”, Mrs. Barrows from “The Catbird Seat”, and Miss Emily from “A Rose for Emily”.
In the story of “Hindus,” the story begins with the main character, “Leela,” a girl, who does not turn out the way how normal Indians are expected to be. In fact she breaks the caste system of her society by marring a Canadian man named “Derek.” In Indian society, people view the caste and class system very strong and people are suppose to marry within their own caste and class. When Leela decided to marry Derek, it was when she started to break her society’s etiquette, and that she needed to overcome how people look at her because that was what she chose to do. In the middle of the story, we could see that Leela didn’t want to be treated as an aristocrat when she said “I disclaimed all kinship to H.R.H.” and “Before my marriage to Derek no one in my family since our initial eruption from Vishnu’s knee had broken caste etiquette. I disclaimed any recent connection with India.” In the story Leela, she claimed herself as an American citizen.
I think the most serious difficulty that she had to overcome was that she had to live by herself after the divorced with Derek. Since she was alone, she had to pay for her own food, shelter and cloth. She found a job as an Administrative Assistant, which she claimed as a menial. From the story there was a part that Pat mentioned, “Leela Lahiri actually going cross-town at night by herself. I remember when your Daddy wouldn’t let you walk the two blocks from school to the...