Susan Faludi's The Power Of Context

One thing we as human beings take pride in is that we, alone among all the animals on this planet, obtain some kind of common sense and a strict system of character. These traits are of great cruciality for they are the factors which create social order and, therefore, keep us on top of the food chain. But what exactly is character? According to Malcolm Gladwell in “The Power of Context”, character is nothing more than “a bundle of habits and tendencies, loosely bound together and dependent, at times, on circumstance and context” (Gladwell 160). While something as fundamental as character can be dependent on something as unstable as habits and context, the right and the wrong in society automatically claim their relationship with the surrounding …show more content…
The cadets surround themselves with a campus which “feels more like an architect’s rendering of a campus- almost preternaturally clean, orderly, antiseptic - than the messy real thing”(Faludi 73) and is full of disabled canons that are stuffed with cement. This alone suggests a gesture of superficial, deceptive and unreal nature. At the same time, the cadets are regularly exposed to the context consisting of the hazing of the knobs on a daily basis, the excessive sadist act on the raccoon, the name-calling that adheres women’s figure to something awful and bad, and also the songs featuring the act of violence on women. Adding to that, Gladwell’s “stickiness factor” can be found in the fourth-system, where the thing that sticks to the cadet is the motto of “acting like a man”. All of these are the tipping factors that lead to how the cadets act. They have been continuously, for decades, passing on the contagious tradition of unreasonable violent treatments on the freshmen. They treat women like objects, express a special hatred and beat them when they feel the women are slipping out of their expectation. But after all of those “virile” acts, the “real men” image is just a mask for their feminine, and sometimes homosexual way of living inside the Citadel. This proves that the inner state and the psychological characteristic of a person is not totally in control of what he or she will present to the world. Susan Faludi also directly states her belief in the fluctuating nature of character. She introduces the opinion of the Citadel’s president that the lazy, dependent character of the Southern boys can be changed by “those habits of order and system” (Faludi 79). Her point of view somewhat agrees that characteristic is not something adherent to a person, but in fact pretty common among people and easily challenged by outer