The quote, “Rushdie's fictionalisation of pre and post independent India is told from Saleem Sinai's perspective, thus it is a history recalled through individual memory, and is admittedly fragmented and incomplete” (Literary Contexts in Novels: Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children".) means that the historical satire of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight's Children revolves around 20th century India when women were trapped at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Women were stuck at the bottom of this ladder due to political and religious customs at the time. However, Rushdie breaks away from the rich history of India during the 20th century, portraying woman in India climbing the social hierarchy by acting against their political and religious duties.
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This critical lens on Midnight’s Children shows how Rushdie does in fact break away from the traditional outlooks of both Hindu and Muslim religion being pure, but rather how showing how everyone belongs to one community, cosmopolitanism, shows how women are illustrated as characters reaching a close to equal social status as men. Overall, the religious ties woman have being severed by their own defiances allow them to break away from men’s traditional protecting …show more content…
A woman being trapped at home is said to totally go against what a woman longs for, claimed by Sara Upstone, who writes “...yet as the feminist desire to see women freed from the confines of domesticity supports, a woman herself could be trapped by, as much as complicit in, the perpetuation of such space” (Domesticity in Magical-Realist Postcolonial Fiction Reversals of Representation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children). Therefore, the majority of woman at the time in India, like Upstone goes on to talk about, are subject to this trap. Upstone using words like “space” and “confines” portrays woman physically being trapped in a small place, showing both how they felt trapped and actually were trapped in their home. However, the Widow breaks away from these stereotypes of woman, as “Mrs. Gandhi, the 'Widow' in "Midnight's Children" is a terrifying picture painted in dark colours, ‘no colour except green and black’” (Literary Contexts in Novels: Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children".). Mrs. Gandhi was a political figure of India as she was the only female Prime Minister, and Saleem Sinai associates her as green as symbol of greed and jealousy, and black as a symbol for the unknown, both of which give a negative connotation. Saleem Sinai narrating the story of the children born at midnight shows
This critical lens on Midnight’s Children shows how Rushdie does in fact break away from the traditional outlooks of both Hindu and Muslim religion being pure, but rather how showing how everyone belongs to one community, cosmopolitanism, shows how women are illustrated as characters reaching a close to equal social status as men. Overall, the religious ties woman have being severed by their own defiances allow them to break away from men’s traditional protecting …show more content…
A woman being trapped at home is said to totally go against what a woman longs for, claimed by Sara Upstone, who writes “...yet as the feminist desire to see women freed from the confines of domesticity supports, a woman herself could be trapped by, as much as complicit in, the perpetuation of such space” (Domesticity in Magical-Realist Postcolonial Fiction Reversals of Representation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children). Therefore, the majority of woman at the time in India, like Upstone goes on to talk about, are subject to this trap. Upstone using words like “space” and “confines” portrays woman physically being trapped in a small place, showing both how they felt trapped and actually were trapped in their home. However, the Widow breaks away from these stereotypes of woman, as “Mrs. Gandhi, the 'Widow' in "Midnight's Children" is a terrifying picture painted in dark colours, ‘no colour except green and black’” (Literary Contexts in Novels: Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children".). Mrs. Gandhi was a political figure of India as she was the only female Prime Minister, and Saleem Sinai associates her as green as symbol of greed and jealousy, and black as a symbol for the unknown, both of which give a negative connotation. Saleem Sinai narrating the story of the children born at midnight shows