Now that I’ve finished all three sections of my book and analyzed them through 3 different literary lenses, I believe that the most insightful lens was the feminist lens as it revealed a lot about the cruel and unfair society Baby resides in. Throughout the book, we are constantly seeing the differences between men and woman and are being reminded of how women are treated very differently as if they’re on a whole different level of less and insecure. In this novel, the author sets up particular distinctions between male and female in a way that I believe looking through a feminist lens could only reveal.
While examining the book through this theory, I feel like I finally understood what everyone means my feminism. By definition, according to Google, Feminism is “the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes.” Although this is straight and to the point, through the novel, the idea of feminism was made clear through descriptions, emotions and scenarios. All that gave me a better overall understanding.
What I found very interesting was how easily the idea of Patriarchy was used. What is that you may ask? Well, basically it’s when Men are way up there, and woman are way down there, in other words,
Women were portrayed to be inferior, weak, naive and easy to take advantage off. All the while,
men were seen to be dominant, strong-minded, independent and people who never seemed to need a woman.
Male dominance is mostly shown through both, Baby’s father and Alphonse. Both these men create specific rules for Baby restricting her in many different ways. If Baby decided not to follow these rules, they would resort to physical or verbal abuse in terms of using sexist terms to teach her a lesson. By doing this, they created an environment where violence is portrayed as the only solution to defiance, which in reality is definitely not true.
Alphonse shows his dominance over Baby when he tells her who she can and can’t have sex with. He makes all these decisions for her without her opinion, yet she is expected to confine to them since defying a strong man was known to be wrong. As Baby mentions, Alphonse tells her, “Get into that Brown car” (218) without any explanation. Only when she gets into the car and the driver starts talking to her, does she realize that she’s in there to have sex with a random man. Alphonse controlled everything Baby did, including her earning and her decisions.
The feminist lens also reveals how men only needed women for their body and their appearance rather than for what they truly are. Alphonse is a clear example of this. Without any regards to Baby’s age, personality, or what she might want, Alphonse took advantage of her by making her have sex with him so fulfill his pleasure. Baby mentions, “There was just a weight. I was making love to the Invisible Man. It felt like something terrible had happened to me… I felt as if my insides were cold” (209-210). Not only did he not ask her if she was comfortable with having sex, but he also paid little attention to the fact that she was a 13 year old virgin who had never had sex before.
These are only a few examples of how the use of Patriarchy occurred throughout the novel. In almost every chapter, I noticed something new and horribly inaccurate about the way women were represented and how they were treated at the hands of men. They were continually seen as losers and people who were only there to satisfy a man’s “needs”.
The use of patriarchy is not only limited to this novel, as we also experience this idea throughout our society as well. Since the beginning of time, the idea of men being dominant had been circulating around and was accepted for centuries. However, up until very recently, the world decided to make a change. Why should someone be seen as dominant, when equality is an option? Isn’t equality the fairest aspect out of everything?
Now that I’m entirely done this novel, I can finally see how hard Baby’s life has been. Especially at such a young age, she was exposed to the dark world of drugs and sex making her life 10x harder then anyone I personally know. For me, this book was an eye opener. At the back of my head I knew that there were kids who were exposed to bad living conditions, however by reading this novel, it felt as if I was Baby’s shadow, experiencing and seeing everything she had.
-Z.K
ENG4UE Blog 
