Femininity In My Life With The Wave

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Recommended: Media representation of gender

At a young age, gender is taught to have associations with different visual cues. Femininity is fragile, wispy, small, weak, grey, negative, and needs to be taken care of like a child. Masculinity is strong, constant, large, with standing, bright, positive, and has the need to be worshiped. Wonder Woman is the strongest example of diverging from the feminine norm yet Superman still swoops in and “rescues” her because that is how females need to be dealt with. Like damsels in distress. In My Life with the Wave, publication in 1949 when gender roles were most prominent in society, the gender associations are clearly marked out. The wave is a female thus she is negative and the man is male thus he is positive. In The Missing Piece, produced in …show more content…

Throughout the piece My Life with the Wave he often describes the wave as cold, aggressive, emotionally unstable, violent, unpredictable, and unreachable. “Cloudy days irritated her; she broke furniture, said bad words, covered me in insults and green and grey foam. (Paz, 16, My Life with the Wave)” To him she is a siren, she lured him in with her “beauty and grace” and then slowly drowned him in her turmoil. “It fit! It fit perfectly! At last! At last!...Oh my, now that it was complete it could not sing at all. “Ah,” it thought. “So that’s how it is!” (Silverstein, 2:54-3:27, The Missing Piece)” It associates the negative ideas of losing individuality in a relationship with the fault of the missing piece(feminine). this attribute of some relationships is seen as weak, illogical, sinful, something that should be avoided at all …show more content…

“When I left the sea, a wave moved ahead of the others. She was tall and light. In spite of the shouts of the others who grabbed by her floating clothes, she clutched at my arm and went off with me leaping. (Paz, 1, My Life with the Wave)” Without even identifying with a gender himself the reader automatically assumes that he is, in fact, a male due to how he described the wave’s actions. She clutched at his arm like he was her savior as he is strong enough to save her. It shows the strength and power he has over her right off the bat of the piece. If he had omitted the use of she/her pronouns the description of her clutching at his arm to save her is a cue enough. In readers minds, the wave must be a female because only females clutch at male’s arms. “It was missing a piece. And it was not happy. So it set off in search of its missing piece. (Silverstein, 0:00-0:18, The Missing Piece)” In this, it is all based on size association. Females are depicted as small and fragile. Males are depicted as large and strong. In a children 's book, this association is automatic based on what they have seen in the relationship their parent’s have. At an early age, it reinforces the idea that females are small fragile creatures while males are big and strong. it starts the basic idea that men have power over

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