Adam's Rib And The Time: Night Analysis

The era of rebuilding for the Soviet Union under Gorbachev called Perestroika, lead the eventual fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and a worsening of women’s place/situation in Russia. In the literature and films of this era, there is a narrowing focus on women issues. Of these issues, one trope seen in these stories depict many generations of women in a single home, each of which represent something different in society. The conflict between these generations of mothers and daughters reflect the struggles of the soviet women. Specifically, the relationships between Russian mothers and daughters in the film Adam’s Rib and the novel The Time: Night are centered on multi-generational conflicts and the repetition of cycles that represent the struggle

Both Adam’s Rib and The Time: Night focus on women during perestroika while men are hardly seen in a positive light if seen at all. In Adam’s Rib, the men characters who are present but do live in the home, and have no real control over the actions of the story. The men of the story (besides Nina’s new boyfriend) are all useless fathers. This is especially prominent with the character Misha. While “Nastia faces shame as a single mother, while Misha 's status as unmarried father is not even an issue” (Salys). Even at the dinner when Nastia announces her pregnancy, one of the first suggestions is an abortion, which is an unwanted and unhelpful suggestion by one of the men. In The Time: Night, Andrei represents the violence increase during perestroika as his story revolves around his prison sentence for fighting (Petrushevskaya 42). The men in these stories are contrasted to the women. “Like intense relationships between women in general, the relationship between mother and daughter has been profoundly threatening to men,” and , by largely eliminating men from these stories, or showing them in a negative light, the women becomes the sole focus (Marsh). The relationships between men and women during perestroika offers little as far as progression of women’s role in society. “Since perestroika, Russian women have been subject to a ‘backlash’, largely from male politicians and journalists, against the alleged ‘over-emancipation’ of women by the Soviet state” (Marsh). The absence of really positive male characters in these works allows for real women struggles to be taken seriously and without much judgement and emphasizes the importance of the mother and daughter relationship as well as the women struggle during