Gender Roles In The Sound Of Waves

Love is an especially disputed topic throughout the world, and many have yet to figure out what love actually means to them. There are countless interpretations and beliefs of what love is and it is different for each person. The Sound Of Waves by Yukio Mishima and Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson both explores different ideas of love and how it works within one’s life by setting up certain gender roles, analyzing the environment, and using the genre of the book to design their vision of a love story. Gender roles in The Sound Of Waves have an incredibly traditional feel to the entire story, and for the characters in the book they are classic archetypes to portray. The man is the one who makes the move in the relationship, does all the heavy lifting, and has to win the father’s approval. There are many stereotyped roles between men and women, especially those within a relationship. Shinji is

The entire story is represented heavily by women, and throughout the book women are doing men’s jobs and being the “head of household or church community”. This switching of gender roles seems okay only when it came to religion, though, because when Jeanette took these gender roles and applied them to her sexuality the church responded in a negative way. They told her she likes girls because she has too many positions of authority within the church like a man does. Jeanette said the Pastor tells her, “That as a mark of new obedience to the Lord I was to give up all preaching, Bible study classes, and form of what he called “Influential contact.”” (Winterson 137) It is believed that if Jeanette continued being an authority figure in church she would continue to like girls because she is acting like a man. They are using nontraditional gender roles as an excuse for Jeanette’s feelings of who she is attracted