Liberal Feminism: Emphasizing Individualism and Equal Rights in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You

Liberal feminism is the emerging mainstream feminism that spotlights gender inequality and women’s liberation within the context of liberal democracy. The aim of the study focuses on the perspectives of liberal feminism using prominent ideas of liberal thinkers in Meena Kandasamy’s award-winning novel When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017). The methodology of the study includes concepts of liberal feminism in the text, and it is substantiated and explored using the ideologies of notable liberal thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and The Subjection of Women. The protagonist’s transition from a submissive to a self-liberated persona strengthens the novel’s credibility as a liberal feminist text. The paper also attempts to show that the concepts of liberal feminism very well appear in the selected text.

Hell Town

In 1852, Kelso was a young schoolteacher in a place nicknamed “Hell Town” in Platte County, Missouri. He faced down a gang of knife-wielding teenaged boys who tried to control the school. Like many nineteenth-century schoolmasters, he used violence and humiliation to assert his authority: he beat the schoolhouse rebels with a dogwood switch (threatening worse), and ritually mocked the gang’s leader. But in the 1850s, the entire Missouri-Kansas borderland, and then the entire country, became a Hell Town, where authority broke down and men reached for weapons, threatening and inflicting violence. The issue was slavery. But which party stood like the schoolmaster, teaching a lesson about law and order, and which was the gang of rebels, needing to be mastered or humiliated and driven out? Proslavery vigilantes harassed anyone expected of abolitionism, and Free Soilers fought back. For the time being, though, Kelso and his young wife stayed quiet.

Introduction: Fatal Ambition

THE QUEEN’S HOUSE WAS modest as royal palaces went in eighteenth-century England. In 1761, King George III purchased the former country home of the Duke of Buckingham for his young wife, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. This unpretentious retreat for the royal family—later expanded substantially—would one day be known as Buckingham Palace. A family home, only a few steps from St. James Palace, the official royal residence, the Queen’s House provided the king and queen with some respite from their official duties....

Painted Worlds and Porous Walls

Propertius’ fourth and final book of elegies also dramatizes the anxieties that emerge when one draws a map. The false promise of order and control, of being able to determine what is “in” and differentiate it from what is “out,” what is “Roman” as opposed to what is “non-Roman” returns in the guise of an Augustan-era map that the young wife, Arethusa, consults in elegy 4.3 and of the walls around early Rome in Tarpeia’s story of transgression from elegy 4.4. Propertius intertwines cartographic fines with the fortified boundaries of the new city, until he retrospectively reconstructs the problem of porous limits as an originary one for Rome, one that does not solely spring up with the imperial expansion of the Augustan age but always already existed at the very beginnings of the city.

Politics of Performance: a Study of Kandasamy’s Novel When I Hit You

“…[T]he category “woman” as well as the category “man” are political and economic categories not eternal ones” as commented by Monique Wittig. However, in any patriarchal society these categories are treated to be eternal through repeated naturalisation determining ‘ideal’ gender roles for both the genders. In Kandasamy’s novel When I Hit You the ‘young wife’ started to imbibe and epitomise the role of an ‘ideal wife’ as determined by the patriarchal society. The novel emphasises on the performativity of the pre-assigned gender roles of the protagonist and the authoritative agencies of patriarchy determining her as “evil spirit” when faced with performative resistance. In this dialectics of performance and resistance the writer’s words become the tool of resistance for the marginalised ‘young wife’ of Kandasamy’s novel. Her criticism is not only against the construction of these gendered roles but also against their naturalisation and appropriation. The primary focus of this paper is thus to discuss the politics behind the gendered roles and the agenda of interpellation working behind the project of their naturalisation with a focus on the necessity of subversion of these roles for the protection of the individual self.

The motif of establishment of relationships in the Karelian wedding runes

Introduction: the ceremony of the Karelian wedding was accompanied by the performance of various folklore works, which performed a certain function and were a reflection of the ritual. The article, based on the texts of the Karelian wedding runes, considers how the process of change of the family and kin status by the bride after marriage took place in the folk tradition. The theme of parting with the parental home and kin is presented in the analyzed texts through stable motifs and images. Objective: to consider through textual analysis with ethnographic context the representation of the image of a young wife and the images of other figures exposing the establishment of new kinship relationships. Research materials: the archival and published variants of Karelian wedding runes recorded during the second half of the XIX – first half of the XX centuries. Additional sources are the dialectal Karelian dictionaries and collections of folklore texts of various genres. Results and novelty of the research: the result of the study is identification and description of the plots, motifs, poetic formulas and methods that characterize the status of a young wife in her husband’s home and describing the process of establishment of new family relations. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that the material of the Karelian wedding runes is used as an independent object of research for the first time. The analyzed names and the motif of establishment of new family relations are considered with the help of linguistic and ethnographic sources, which allows us to fully reveal their semantics.

Fire in Traditional Russian Weddings in the Ulyanovsk Volga Region

В статье рассматривается использование огня на русской традиционной свадьбе Ульяновского Поволжья в контексте общерусской и частично общеславянской традиции. Отмечается, что осмысление этого обрядового акта - зажигание костра на свадьбе началось еще в конце XIX в. и продолжается вплоть до сегодняшнего дня. Широкое распространение эта традиция получила и на территории Ульяновской области. Анализ записей позволил построить типологию свадебных костров в зависимости от времени и места их проведения: костер разжигали на первый день после венчания; ночью под окнами дома, в котором ночевали молодые; утром под окнами дома; днем перед домом молодой. Определены функции этого обрядового действия, прежде всего осознаваемые самими носителями традиции: мотивационная, информационная, церемониальная, театрально-игровая, ритуально-магическая. Выявлена семантика огня в отдельных свадебных актах и отмечено, что это прежде всего сексуальная семантика. Указывается, что зажигание свадебного костра в основном связано с ритуалом бужения молодых и обрядом «Поиски ярки», причем в некоторых вариантах они представляют собой одно сложное действо. В целом на территории Ульяновской области зажигание костра было активным и продуктивным в течение всего ХХ в. Неслучайно об этой традиции как о живой рассказывали информанты, родившиеся на рубеже XIX-XX вв., в 1920-1930-е и даже в 1940-1950-е гг., а последнее свидетельство о костре на свадьбе относится к 2003 г. This article considers the ritual use of fire in traditional Russian weddings in the Ulyanovsk Volga Region, seen in the context of the broader Russian and, in part, the Slavic tradition. This ritual act - the lighting of a bonfire at a wedding - began at the end of the nineteenth century and continues today. This tradition is widespread in the Ulyanovsk Region. Analysis of records has allowed the author to build a typology of wedding fires depending on the time and place of their occurrence. Fire might be kindled on the first day after the wedding, at night under the windows of the house in which the young spent the night; in the morning under the windows of the house; in the afternoon in front of the house of the young wife. The many functions of this ritual action are: motivational, informational, ceremonial, theatrical and play, ritual and magic. The author analyzes the semantics of fire in particular wedding acts; it is, first of all, sexual semantics. Lighting a wedding fire is mainly associated with the ritual of the awakening (buzhenie) of the young married couple and the ritual search for little sheep (“yarka”), and in some cases they are one complex action. In general, on the territory of the Ulyanovsk Region, bonfire lighting was active throughout the twentieth century. Informants born at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, in the 1920s-1930s and even in the 1940s-1950s, describe this tradition as a living one, and the most recent testimony of a bonfire at a wedding is from 2003.

Going on, or Achieving Interruption

This reading of Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir explores how poetry helps the poet to grieve for his young wife and enables him to go on. The issue for him is how to begin living again, how to put an end to the deathly paralysis that immobilised him following her death. Analysis of the relationship to time in the poems shows that Roubaud is concerned not just to render the passing of time but to make time pass. Particular attention is paid to the structural anomaly of the four poems in the collection that do not have nine verses and the use of hyperbaton in order to argue that Roubaud’s concern is to interrupt the stillness, so that the ending of his wife’s life will not be the final ending.