Traffic In Women

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The oppression and objectification of women is not natural but, through social mediation, it has become an accepted cultural norm. Considering a combination of feminist theory and Marx’s theory of capitalist economics, women are seen as the objects or commodities that maintain the social relationships among men. Anthropologist Gale Rubin introduces the term sex/gender system in her essay “The Traffic In Women”. Rubin defines sex/gender system as a “set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied” (Rubin 771). This is significant in establishing that gender is a social construct rather than a natural phenomenon. Rubin prefers this …show more content…
The Bechdel test, while usually applied to films, asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women characters that are named and talk to each other about something other than a man. Works that pass the test are considered to have a rudimentary level of female agency and independence. Ernest Hemingway’s hyper masculine novel, A Farewell to Arms, does not pass the Bechdel test. Published in 1929, it is set in Italy during World War I and centers around Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver in the Italian army. Catherine Barkley is an English nurse and serves as Henry’s love interest. Unlike Henry, she is a static character who does not function as an individual with her own purpose. The relationship between Fredrick Henry and Catherine Barkley embodies how, through idealization and objectification, women come to internalize the social expectations and implications of a patriarchal sex/gender system. The idealization, submission, and eventual death of Catherine Barkley demonstrate her sole purpose as an exchangeable commodity to further the development of Frederic Henry and fulfill his …show more content…
As Henry’s love interest, her purpose is to fulfill his desires. In A Reader’s Guide to Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Waldhorn writes, Catherine is “archetypally ideal, the quintessence of adolescent and middle-aged male desire” (Waldhorn 123). Throughout the novel, Catherine is obsessed with ensuring her status as the ideal woman. This ideal being that a woman is submissive and affectionate, sees her lover as god, and desires only to shed her own identity and replaces it with the man she loves. Steven Venturino explains Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the Eternal Feminine as the societally imposed images promote and idealized concept of women rather than recognizing them as unique individuals (Venturino 153). This system works “in a patriarchal society by restricting woman to function as a male-dominated abstraction or object without a subjectivity of its own” (Venturino 156). Henry’s desire for Catherine is a result of these images and his idealization of her. In Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, she defines Freud’s concept of scopophilia as the “taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey 59). Catherine, made an object by the patriarchal sex/gender system of the Western world, is subjected to Henry’s gaze. His gaze is influenced by the idealized image of women he has been conditioned to expect. Considering Marx’s concept of commodity
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