"The doll", a gender issue

Today’s topic is an other short story I read at school, “The doll” by Jean Rhis, which deals with a child who act in a different way from the other women of her age. As a matter of fact, the story begins with two presents arrived from the Irish granny of the protagonist, which are two beautiful dolls, one fair and the other one dark. As soon as the little girl saw the dark one, she realized that she wanted her like she had never wanted anything before. Unfortunately her little sister made a quick move towards the object of the desire. She tried to explain she saw the dark doll first, but her mother immediately rushed to her sister rescue, reminding her that she was the elder one and she should have been pleased to make her little sister happy, also because nobody would have loved her if she had  been so selfish. The girl was so angry she ran away in the garden and decided to smash the poor fair doll’s face, even though she didn’t really know why. Her mother was so uneasy that she asked the help of her husband, a figure that we can guess was not so present in her daughter’s life. He looked disappointed and he scolded her for her bad gesture, and he also threatened her not to let her go to her great aunt Jane, a person we can guess was very important to the protagonist. However he recommended her not to worry her mother once again and decided not to give her a punishment. Only when she was in her great aunt’s arms she felt guilty about what she had done and she wept.

Perhaps we can interprete the implicit moral of this short story as a description of the behaviors that people expected from women in the historical period of the author. In fact, the little girl of the story has a way of act that isn’t as compliant as that of the other women in her family, apart from great aunt Jane, the only one that really knows her, ‘cause she is rebel, headstrong, she has her own ideas, she wants to makes his own decisions and she fights for what she wants, not fitting in. In the text we also read that there was an other aunt that didn’t like the child just because she hated sewing, a task considered proper for girls at that time, and this is an other example of the nonconformism to the society rules of that age.

Also nowadays there are still differences between the behave and the way of be that society consider appropriate for male and female gender, for instance in sports, clothes and even feelings: boys are pushed since their childhood by their families to be strong, aggressive, powerfull and competitive,in order to achieve positions of power and prestige, for example in the world of work. On the contrary, girls are encouraged to dedicate themselves to more delicated sport, such as dancing, just ‘cause they appear weak and fragile.

I think is time to mix this behaviours, also swapping the roles model that we consider inappropriate for us!

Do you agree with me? Let me know your ideas! :)