Page 1 of 7
European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 02
February 2019
Available online: https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 458
Under a heap of dust They buried
her ‘Cage'- Tragic, but no more
MANALI BALHARA
LADY SHRI RAM COLLEGE FOR WOMEN, DELHI UNIVERSITY
Under a heap of dust they buried her ‘Cage'- Tragic, but no more
Manali Balhara
Abstract:
Women, like men, are subject to many of the same disciplinary practices that Michael
Foucault describes. But he is blind to those forms of subjection that engender the feminine
body perpetuating the silence and powerlessness of those upon whom these disciplines
have been imposed ( Sandra Lee Bartky 27). This is similar to burying the already
‘caged’ in a heap of dust in order to avoid visibility, this is tragic but for how long can
They [they] bury the very essence of women? This paper attempts to trace the struggle
against such tragic entrapment of the female self-amidst literature and life.
Keywords- Disciplinary practices, Michael Foucault, Feminine Body, Struggle.
Michel Foucault’s works cut across disciplines, encompassing all branches of
knowledge-medical, political, sexual, et all for he attempts to show that all systems of
knowledge, past and present and yet to come, are linked within a great chain of being.
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European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 02
February 2019
Available online: https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 459
This great chain of being is invariably implicated in and impacted by one’s experiences
of femininity and masculinity, vicariously through literature as an art that reflects life.
But Foucault is criticized by Sandra Lee Bartky, for considering the body as if it were
one throughout, as if the bodily experiences of men and women did not differ and as if
men and women bore the same relationship to the characteristic institutions of the
modern life (Bartky 27), in his account of the disciplinary practices that produce the
“docile bodies” of modernity in Discipline and Punish.
“The Order of Discourse” taken from Discipline and Punish raises the question of the
freedom of what is spoken and written, particularly the role of social institutions, as, for
example, the rise of prisons in the early nineteenth century and the exercise of power through the
discipline of the “body”, which is the Panopticon model oriented towards the production of
isolated and self-policing subjects. This Panoptican process of observation and reflection has
characterized a profound transformation in the exercise of power, which Foucault calls “a
reversal of the political axis of individualization”, as quoted by Sandra Lee Bartky. For example,
the brutal methods and gross assaults used to regulate bodies in the early times by the Royal
Individual, the Monarch, have now been achieved with ceaseless surveillance and a better
understanding of the specific person, of the genesis and the nature of his “case”. In Bartky’s
words, “it is a finer control of the body and its movements.” Such “finer control” or surveillance
leads to a self that is committed to a relentless self-surveillance which is a form of obedience to
patriarchy. This panoptican model reduces the mechanism of power in its ideal form, in the name
of safe haven.
Northrop Frye uses the metaphor of the caged bird for this system of psychological
oppression that immobilize, segment and freeze the women’s spaces ( since the panopticon
parallels the cruel, ingenious cage).Women are identified with birds that are characteristically
non-predators and lacking in intelligence or nobility, such as chick, canary, chicken, pigeon,
dove, parakeet, and hummingbird. Breaking away, Isabel Allende, a feminist Chilean writer,
identifies a girl with a strong “eagle” in The City of the Beasts (2002). Moreover, Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening (1899) extensively uses avian vocabulary and imagery for understanding
women’s oppression. The association of women with birds may owe its oppressive quality to the
cages that immobilize them. The protagonist, Edna Pontellier is a metaphorical portrayal of a
bird that came out of the cage by the means of self-reinvention of the body and soul but chooses
to drown herself in order to escape from a society that sought to confine her and leave her lying
buried under the dust of oppression as a minimal figure.
In 1972, Mary Wollstonecraft published the first Feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the
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European Journal of Business &
Social Sciences
Available at https://ejbss.org/
ISSN: 2235-767X
Volume 07 Issue 02
February 2019
Available online: https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 460
Rights of a Woman, using symbolic birds to refer to women’s oppression. According to
Wollstonecraft, women are “confined in the cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to
do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.” This metaphor of
the caged birds allude to women’s entrapment in marriage, a social constraint which Edna
Pontellier is forced to confront as she is relentlessly under surveillance by the inhabitants of her
own house and even herself, because she always feels herself, because she always feels aware of
her role as housewife. For instance, she forces herself to be in cheerful mode in front of her
guests, even though she is internally upset. This internal surveillance or internalized oppression
is the result of the disciplinary practices she has learned about being a lady. For Bartky, these
practices that control the female figure, its gestures or behavior, movements, and cosmetics turn
women into prisoners once they become their own panopticon. Such drawing of the women by
the patriarchal pen is spread across theories and literatures like a topping over the crust.
The interest in the application of discipline through discursive and other practices continues
in the last of Foucault’s work, the three volumes of The History of Sexuality. The seventeenth
century was the period of sexual frankness, when codes governing obscenity, indecency were
lax. The later seventeenth century- which Foucault characterizes as the age of sexual repression- choked sex with repression. The Puritan fathers in American thought of raising prisonhouses in
order to constrain sexual liberties. For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, set in
the seventeenth century Puritan Boston, juxtaposes the proliferation of sexual discourses
alongside the institution of confession and the importance of penance, as in the case of Hester
Prynne, the female protagonist, as a retribution and re-incorporation for the ills of the flesh.
William Shakespeare, with complexity, associates the tragic and the comic contexts with
sexuality. Desdemona in Othello is both witty and courtly, as well as admiring, if not envious, of
her husband’s martial prowess; in Emilia, wit is portrayed as the means of expressing women’s
sexual desires, just as with Margaret in Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare gives a hope
through such a vivid picture of social transition but condemns women to death for their wit and
desires in tragedy ( Cordelia in King Lear and Ophelia in Hamlet embody the same virtues and
suffer the same fate) while he makes them triumphant in comedy, for instance, Rosalind in As
You Like It. In Shakespeare and the Experience of Love, Kirsch has shown how in Much Ado
About Nothing, Claudio’s misperception of Hero is based on his idealization of her. He cannot
see her properly, because he sees ‘with other men’s eyes, the mind of the past, the myth of
women’s infidelity and sexual insatiability’. Thus, Shakespeare produces a representation of
representation, forcing the readers to see how characters without a consolidated sense of self,
force all their objects to fit in the archaic images.
