Feminism In Elaine Showalter's Sedation

My paper is based on feminism which speaks about a female writer in the story Sedation, who is caught in the web of marriage and familial responsibilities. It also depicts the narrator’s experience of the eraser of her true self. It focuses on Marriage and family which play a key role in controlling the mindset of the woman and her actions in the story. My focal point is on monitoring of woman’s interests, especially writing, by the men within the family as well as outside the family. I would stress upon the struggles the narrator undergoes to overcome the problem. My emphasis is on the writing which reflects the narrator’s life. It also speaks of an instinct of writing which is killed and how it later springs up due to the unconscious drive

She described the change in the late 1970s as a shift of attention from ‘androtexts’ to ‘gynotexts’. The subjects of gynocriticism are the history, styles, themes, genres and structures of writing by women; the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or collective female career; and the evolution or laws of a female literary tradition. It examines the female struggle for identity and the social construct of gender. Sedation is a story which speaks about the struggle of the protagonist for self identity and also pays way to examine the social construct of gender. Female identity is sought free from the masculine definitions and oppositions. Gynocriticism challenges women suffering envy of male and feelings of inadequacy and injustice, combined with feelings of intellectual inferiority. Pyschodynamic approach is based on Sigmund Freud’s theory that creativity arises from the tension between conscious reality and unconscious drives and that the creative product is a way to express unconscious wishes in a publicly accepted manner. Freud believed that the unconscious mind stored all the thoughts, memories and feelings that disturbed the mind and later were

Every woman is expected to take up the role of an ideal house wife as it is accepted as an important assignment of marriage. In the earlier stage even the narrator was comforted with the role of an ideal wife but later she realizes that all her interests are buried then she feels that she is in a cage, in a suffocative atmosphere. The familial bonding of marriage has strengthened her cage. Marriage forces the narrator to dependency. The development of a family can happen only when a woman gets her identity erased in a procedural manner. The narrator feels like a voiceless, flightless bird with no liberation. Marriage gives men the licence of withholding women’s power in the assumption of comforting family. The self is killed in the institution of marriage and family. The narrator enjoyed writing in her youth. She found solace in writing. But her neighbours pitied her husband as she neither showed interest in cooking classes nor in learning embroidery like other women. Instead she joined tennis and gym to safe guard herself and her interests. But later at certain period of time she had given up writing and got indulged in cooking, washing and cleaning and she adds that society is satisfied as it has squashed her dreams of writing. Society’s plans have caught her up. Within the restrictions of marriage she wants to re-emerge as a writer and express