Reading Gender

Lauren Best

4 / 12 / 09

Reading Gender

What a wonderful world! In today’s society the perfect life, a life without thinking, is easy with a number of readily available painkillers, beautiful appliances, and HD TV sets. These sentiments might seem right out of the post-war 50s America, yet they are all a part of an omnipresent oppressive force on modern women in Rosario Castellano’s groundbreaking play The Eternal Feminine. Castellano’s play presents a wide spectrum of over-the-top situations and stories that all contain a similar thread: the ideal woman. Who is she? What does she look like? How does she behave? This play tackles it all! The first scene in the play sets the stage for the rest with a great deal of social commentary. The salesman proudly showcases his new invention – a gadget so ideal that only a computer brain could make it! Poor Lupita who is soon to be married is chosen to sample this new dream simulating hair-dryer and goes through multiple, terrifying and enlightening nightmares that reflect a great deal of parody on the way women are “supposed to be”. The initial scene with the salesman, owner, hairdresser, and Lupita reflect not only the way society treats women and wants them to be but also reflects a growing laziness and lethargy in Western culture. As the salesman pitches his invention to the salon owner and hairdresser, he presents a number of happy, ideal dreams that each lucky woman can have with her new dream machine: “she dreams that she is the prettiest woman in the world; that all the men are falling in love with her; that all women envy her; that her husband got a raise in salary; that there’s no increase in the basic cost of living; that she finds an inexpensive and efficient maid; that she gets pregnant this month; that she doesn’t get pregnant this month; etc.” All of these so-called ideal dreams that are available to women soon turn into vicious nightmares, however, once they enter Lupita’s troubled subconscious. The reader soon finds out that none of these perfect dreams are quite as good as they seem. When Lupita first begins to dream, she sees herself with her husband, but instead of being sensitive and kind to her, he is rough with her sexually and complains at how much she does not obey him. This scene conveys the most primitive scenario for how women should be. Sadly males still often take the more dominant role due to social conditioning. In a scene that follows soon after, Lupita sees her mother soon after she becomes pregnant. Lupita’s mother forces her to eat sweets so that she will gain weight and strip herself of make-up, nice clothing, or anything that would make Lupita happy. Lupita’s mama tells her how her young Lupita will become just like herself. The mother tells her how she does not need to be happy or seek pleasure – she will find those things when her husband and children are happy. This scene continues to comment on the traditional roles of women, especially in 20^th Century culture. Women were to be self-less and subservient, nothing more. All of the scenes that follow basically follow under this vein of what has oppressed women throughout the history of mankind. By writing this play, Castellano’s was able to point out so many flaws in history that have brought us to where we are now and hopefully will make more women acknowledge their own inner feminist.