Analysis #6

Feminist Theory

At Breakfast by Giovanna Pollarolo

She is pale, her eyes baggy

A fixed gesture of loathing

Has engrained deep lines

The scream, the apprehension

The tight jaw

Lips almost non-visible

She used to have an open smile and soft skin

Big and beautiful eyes

But she has three children

And a husband for whom she cries

She looks like a withered flower

He, mature and handsome

Looks at himself in the mirror and smiles, pleased

Who would have thought…, as he caresses himself

The ugly duckling.

He’s been heavily rewarded

And when he sees her in the mornings

At breakfast

He feels the pleasure of revenge

And a bit of pity.

Analysis:

     Men fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them on every level as the other/define them exclusively in opposition to men. Within the poem the husband sees himself as victorious because he has sufficiently placed his wife in the realm of the other.

      The husband becomes actualized by marginalizing his wife. He is essential, powerful, an imposer of will, while his wife, is inessential, incomplete, and mutilated by her position. Through dominance the wife has lost her identity and become a character type of femininity and submission. By defining his wife as the other, the husband has stripped her of her humanity.

      Within history there is no real justification for placing woman in the role of the subordinate, there is merely a collection of attitudes, preconceptions and injustices that allow one group (men) to subjugate another (woman) in order to gain power.

      Women are socially constructed into a feminine ideal that conditions women to accept passivity, dependence, repetition, and inwardness. The woman in the poem is clearly representative of this construction and in doing so depicts the debilitating effects such a construction has on those born female sexed.

The largest adversity to this situation is women themselves, who like the wife in the poem, are complacent with their oppressive status.