Comparison Of Gender And Class In Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees

Gender and Class in Barbara Kingsolver ‘s The Bean Trees and Toni Morrison’s Home

Introduction

It is no news that gender and class affect the treatment of people in mainstream America, and that explains why it is dismissed as the norm. There seem to be a desensitization against gender oppression when it comes to women, in the wake of protests from the LGBTI to be integrated into the society. There is a cultural pressure on women – sexuality, motherhood, body, identity and other intersections of who a woman is. Coupled with these pressures and unreal societal expectations is domesticity closely knit with poverty. Women especially shrink back from doing things because they are concerned with what people are going to say. These two works deal

with the social oppression that minorities face. Therefore this paper examines how class affects gender treatment, especially lower class women in America drawing on theories of social context in literary criticism, and feminism, through a contextual analysis of these texts.
While some women may be privileged because of their race, or class, every woman is disadvantaged by gender. Sexism, the byproduct of patriarchy affects women almost everywhere. In Home, Toni Morrison acknowledges that in a patriarchal society, there is a limitation to being a woman (126). It is evident in the way women are being represented especially in the media. As pointed out in The Second Sex: “Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth” (Beauvoir 2010). Thus, gender oppression cannot be separated from patriarchy. Gender, more often than not has to do with culture and society. In The Bean Trees, Lee Sing, a Chinese cashier at the grocery store, when she sees Lou Ann’s pregnancy, and predicts that she is having a girl, calls the baby “New Year pig”; she claims that “Feeding a girl is like feeding the neighbor’s New Year Pig. All that work. In the end, it goes to some other family” (35). This further proves that while some women may not face oppression because of race or class, they definitely do because of their gender, irrespective of culture.
Women in most literature are usually identified with men. What Virginia Woolf wrote: “It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were…not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex” (NATC 899), rings true with many American literatures. While it may not be deliberate, most novels follow the same pattern, because women being seen through the eyes of men sells.
“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer” (NATC 900)!

The society dismisses some underlying issues that women contend with

Contrary to what women have internalized about other women, and their friendships – “…women are so suspicious of any interest that has not some obvious motive behind it, so terribly accustomed to concealment and suppression…” (NATC 900) – Barbara Kingsolver paints a different picture in The Bean Trees.

Gender and Class

These two novels present society’s stereotypical view of women. While it is not clear if the intentions of the authors were to expose this stereotype of poor working women, or to validate it, both novels are replete with domesticity. Taylor comes from a single parent household, and her mother is described to have a domestic job. Virginia Woolf points out that “… it is become evident that women, like men, have other interest besides the perennial interests of domesticity” (NATC 899). Mattie singlehandedly and successfully runs a tire store, which looks unconventional to a patriarchal society. Throughout history, women are expected to be domestically minded, and that influences the kind of profession they take up later in life. According to Taylor, “In Pittman if a woman had tried to have her own tire store she would have been run out of business. That, or the talk would have made your ears curl up like those dried apricot things” (The Bean Trees 49). The society is really stuck on dictating gender roles and

performance.
The first few pages of the novel sets a background of events. An impoverished town in Kentucky, and a restless young woman who wants more out of life than what is being dictated. She echoes, Beauvoir’s believe that it is naturally instinctive for women for women to try to escape the world in which they are bound by misunderstanding or are unrecognized (Second Sex 2010). Taylor, in order to escape her society, particularly the gender constrain her feminine name, and the unpleasant life it brings, changes her name. She declares “When I drove over the Pittman line I made two promises to myself…The first was that I would get myself a new name. I wasn’t crazy about anything I had been called up to that point in life, and this seemed like the time to make a clean break. I didn’t have any special name in mind but just wanted a change” (13). She changes her name to Taylor, a rather masculine name. A change of name can be a way of destroying your old identity, because it is part of who you are. The question then is, why will a young lady that seem to have the rest of her life before her want to throw away the life she knew and start afresh? The answer is in the first chapter of the book. Every girl in her community fit into a stereotype. As acknowledged by Mary Jean DeMarr,
[Taylor] sees little hope for herself in Kentucky and is passionately determined to avoid the future that seems likely, as it is the fate of most of her female classmates: early pregnancy, marriage, motherhood, and continued hard work for a little reward - being caught permanently in the poverty and bleak life typical of Pittman, Kentucky. (Critical Companion 47)
. Jolene, a high school dropout, married to an up-to-no good young man, gives a clue to why Taylor wants to escape.
Some of the men in Pittman are abusive. Jolene’s father-in-law is physically violent towards her and her baby. When Taylor tries to find out why she married her husband, the response Jolene gives explains it all “why not, my daddy’d been calling me a slut practically since I was thirteen, so why the hell not? Newt was just who it happened to be” (10). Body or slut shaming is one way the society oppresses women. The society ignores the men that sleep with these young women, but blames them for it. The perpetuators and the victimizers are one and the same. “I told her that I didn’t know, because I didn’t have a daddy. That I was lucky that way. She said yeah” (10). This statement explains, if not all, but part of the reason Taylor flees Pittman, Kentucky. And it also gives an insight into her passion for the community of single women, and single mothers she builds with her friends later in the novel. “Taylor had been deeply aware of the class division in her community, partly as a result of her mother’s example and situation. Taylor always feels herself to be something of an outsider” (Critical Companion 47). Later in the novel, the author shows Taylor’s frustration with the class divide in the society. “There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down – look what they do to those people at Mattie’s. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor…” (The Bean Trees 191). The society creates and blames the poor, the same way it berates the women that tries to conform to its standard of womanhood.
There is no doubt that gender and social class contribute a great deal in how women are treated in, and by the society. Through the character of Lou Ann, Kingsolver put on the table the objectification and exaggerated sexualization of women, however, the degree of degrading treatment meted out to women sometimes is dependent on their social class. Poor women are usually at the receiving end of this disrespect. Women get sexually assaulted, albeit covertly in public transits, since they cannot afford a car, or a private and more dignifying way of getting to their destination. Lou Ann is a typical woman who gets picked on while using public transportation. She escapes the molestation for the first time as a pregnant woman. She becomes an undesirable sexual object because she does not fit into the ideal beautiful woman. And it is really sad that even teenage boys have internalized this patriarchal construction of a female body. According to Kingsolver:
The high school boys didn’t make remarks under their breath or try to rub against her when the bus made sudden stops and turns. To be able to relax this way on a crowded bus was a new experience for Lou Ann, and she thought in some ways it would not be so bad to go through your life as a pregnant lady…It was pure pleasure not to have men pushing into her and touching her on the bus (32-33).