People like to believe they have control over their own decisions; however, all decisions and all actions are taken under a system of laws and moral and cultural codes ingrain into everyone since childhood. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, he notes that state of nature is where everyone is free and at peace, but as population grows and people’s needs changes, humans starts to group themselves together, loosing that freedom. Socially, one must lose their individual freedom for the collective good. Also, there is a heterosexual and gender culture embedded in the social structure, as seen in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where she argues for woman’s education, not to free women of the suppressive culture,
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Women are taught rely on their beauty and manners, making them nothing more than “alluring mistresses” to men, who are socialize to see women only as beautiful objects rather than a human. In this narrative, both women and men have little individual agency for they must operates within the confides of their gender. The same can be said for the women and men in Meiji Japan. When Sanshiro board the train, he notice a woman whose features “fitted together” and when they got to the hotel, she wants to submit to him sexually. Despite her taking the initiative, she still operates with restricted agency because her role as a woman is second to Sanshiro, a man. She creates openings but never more than that. Within this culture, it is not her place to initiate the act; she cannot make that decision without breaking the cultural and social boundary she is place in. Additionally, Sanshiro just left home and has never been to the city yet; he does not understand women of the present, questioning if there were “other women like her in the world,” highlighting the change industrialization has on gender roles during this era. Sanshiro could not act when his knowledge of his role as a man does not match up to the modern city women. He is constricted in the
Women are taught rely on their beauty and manners, making them nothing more than “alluring mistresses” to men, who are socialize to see women only as beautiful objects rather than a human. In this narrative, both women and men have little individual agency for they must operates within the confides of their gender. The same can be said for the women and men in Meiji Japan. When Sanshiro board the train, he notice a woman whose features “fitted together” and when they got to the hotel, she wants to submit to him sexually. Despite her taking the initiative, she still operates with restricted agency because her role as a woman is second to Sanshiro, a man. She creates openings but never more than that. Within this culture, it is not her place to initiate the act; she cannot make that decision without breaking the cultural and social boundary she is place in. Additionally, Sanshiro just left home and has never been to the city yet; he does not understand women of the present, questioning if there were “other women like her in the world,” highlighting the change industrialization has on gender roles during this era. Sanshiro could not act when his knowledge of his role as a man does not match up to the modern city women. He is constricted in the