The Role Of Women: Rama And Sita To A Trial By Fire

9:00 I will argue that the reason Rama doubts his wife’s fidelity and subjects her to a trial by fire is because Rama and Sita were surrounded by a large crowd and therefore subject to the culture’s biases and pressure. This means that people of that time may have collectively held a bias towards women as detrimental to society through their possession of negative traits. This alludes to the possible viewed role of women as generally impressionable and evil members of society. First I will demonstrate it is true that Rama doubts Sita because he is influenced by his large audience and the pressure of their observation. Next I will explain the accurate meaning of my rationale is that the crowd holds prejudices towards women. Then I will prove how this leads to the assumptions that the roles of women are weak-minded and evil members of society. After that I will support these claims of my thesis by proving that: The influence of the crowd on Rama determines his actions, the crowd’s decision reflects their position on women in …show more content…
One could perhaps argue against me by asserting the point that Rama felt the need to personally test Sita’s integrity and it was not the influence of his audience that created his response. However, Rama may have acted in this manner because of societal pressure alone. What I mean is that he chose this route of action in opposition to his personal trust in Sita. In the chapter following Sita’s trial by fire Rama explains “he had to adopt this trial in order to demonstrate Sita’s purity beyond a shadow of doubt to the whole world” (Ramayana, 150), because Rama is defending his actions by saying it was a demonstration to the world, it implies he is not demonstrating anything for himself. This implication leads me to believe that he personally did not doubt Sita because he would not have held the trial