“A Warrior’s Daughter” was a little different from the other stories we’ve
experienced among the autobiographies we have read. Maybe because
we went from male authors to a female author that this story seems
unusual. Different points of views may be expressed as the gender
changes. A woman experiencing life in a Native American tribe is quite
different from that of a man. Their roles in life are completely different
as seen through the depiction from all the autobiographies that we
have read.
Zitkala-Sa’s “A Warrior’s Daughter” was a little different because it
expressed a more romantic, love-story kind of style. In addition, it
was also different in that we experienced a woman entering into a
masculine role. The woman of the name Tusee conjured up bravery
in order to save her “lover” seemed very heroic, but different because
it was done by a female. In past readings, especially with *The Life
of Black Hawk, *it was always the men killing other men, never a woman.
Also, quite surprisingly, she outsmarted a man and went as far as
killing him too. I just felt that this was out of the ordinary and a much
displaced gender role.
At the end of the story there is an interesting juxtaposition. The sentence
goes, “the sight of his weakness makes her strong” (69). Generally, the
association is usually male with strength and female with weak, but we
see it switched here. It was a woman that embodies this masculine
concept—strength. This sentence just stood out to me because the
idea of strength and bravery isn’t too common among women of Native
American tribes. We experience courage, bravery, and strength among
the warrior men as seen through our other reading, *The Life of Black
Hawk*, but not too much with women.
Understanding that this was written by a woman, maybe we are experiencing
a sense of women empowerment by Zitkala-Sa. To see a woman
outsmart a man and even kill him, to see that a woman can express the
strength of her passion seems to be very empowering for women.
Any thoughts?
~H. N.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
A Note on Gender Reversals in "A Warrior's Daughter"
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I love this topic.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I never really felt that gender of the writer did much to change the piece itself, but it really is a huge difference in both tone and subject.
When I look back on the male autobiographies compared to the females, the females definitely tend to lean towards the descriptions of mother nature and the beautiful things in life while the males go explicitly into the scalping and the hunting.
In my last essay, I wrote about how Indian females were largely underrepresented because males in Indian societies lived such separate, honored lives. Women were looked down upon, so it's hard to get a legitimate perspective of a woman's life unless it was from a female writer herself - and even that is rare.