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How Is Gender, Race, And Class Portrayed In Catch-22?

1316 Words6 Pages

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is set in Lorain, Ohio, during the tail end of the Great Depression and primarly follows the lives of the MacTeer family, consisting of their two daughters, Claudia and Frida. Pecola stays with the MacTeers, as her father, Cholly, is in jail and her mother, Pauline, went to work for a white family. Henry Washington, a boarder, also stays with the MacTeers. Despite the MacTeers struggling to make ends meet, Pecola lacks a stable familial unit, making Claudia and Frida feel bad for her. Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class is a marxist analysis of how gender, race, and class intersect with each other, covering U.S. history from the slave trade to the women’s liberation movements that began in the 1960s. Both texts …show more content…

Davis comments that “Women suffered in different ways as well, for they were victims of sexual abuse and other barbarous mistreatment that could only be inflicted on women. Expediency governed the slaveholders posture toward female slaves: when it was profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles'' (Davis 1-2). Black women were devoid of the innocence and purity that comes with womanhood and subject to violence from not only their slave masters, but society at large. Although they were excluded from purity culture that was drilled into white women: sex outside of wedlock made you indesirable to any man, their womanhood was only acknolwegded when convenient to justify the rampant sexual violence that occured during the time of slavery. The female roles that Black women carried were dehumanizing; sexual beings to their slave masters, mothers to the children born from being raped by their slavemasters, their families were broken apart. This dehumanization of Black women also manifests in the minds of young girls, who are more vulnerable to sexual violence due to their inability to fully comprehend the nature of the act. Claudia interrogates Frida about what happened to her when Mr. Henry touched her, and Frida went on about how she was ruined. Frida says, ‘"Miss Dunion came in after everybody was quiet, and Mama and Daddy was fussing about who let Mr. Henry in anyway, and she said that Mama should take me to the doctor, because I might be ruined, and Mama started screaming all over again.’ ‘At you?’ ‘No. At Miss Dunion.’ ‘But why were you crying?’ ‘I don't want to be ruined!’ (Morrison 101). Frida’s forceful

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