Contradictory Pressures on Women

DESPITE THE UNIQUE aspect of Indian culture and the vast differences between Indian concepts of the role of women and the family and our own, I am struck by how well this film demonstrates some of the more universal conflicts of women. It shows dramatically how a girl can be trapped between the universal need for a "good earth" mother, a magic source of life and healing, and the tendency we have to turn on her and view her as destructive, evil, and withholding when she fails to live up to these irrational expectations. The dilemma of a young woman who has been infantilized and overprotected as a beautiful child and is then suddenly expected to be mother of us all, is especially poignant in the case of Doya, who came as a child-bride to an upper-class household, where there was no mother-in-law to train her to be an adequate wife and mother. With her own husband away at school, she becomes overly dependent on her father-in-law, thus illustrating her enormous need for a parent. The old man's loneliness and need for a wife makes the symbiosis more binding. Doya is depressed at being childless, but gets gratification from mothering her father-in-law and young nephew.

As the most submissive and helpless member of the household, her deification serves her need for self-validation, as well as gratifying the father-in-law's need for a magic mother. While this magic solution has cultural and religious backing in India, it also parallels the complaints of the many American women who feel they also need to be devoted and subservient. Some feel they are put on a pedestal, glorified, and idealized only to be exploited and enchained. They feel that men seduce and worship them, yet add the unrealistic burdens of being a wife and mother at the same time. They are blamed if they do not produce perfect children a lá Spockian era.

Deification of a woman only leads to her crucifixion. Paddy Chayevsky in his movie "The Goddess" shows how deification of the American movie queen m