preview

Why Roselily, Doesn T Crime Pay?

Good Essays

The short story entitled, “Roselily” attacks the masculine agenda as it regards women the secondary beings and places them next to the men in hierarchy. The men enjoy supremacy and take relative freedom in their relationship with women, ignore and abandon them without any obligation to their duties. The sexual behavior of men highly pressurizes Roselily under the burden of four children, each by different father and the fourth one taken away by the child’s father. The men burden Roselily with motherhood and desert her. The reasons behind it might be the racial turmoil of the time but it breeds the irresponsible behavioral pattern in them and they simply drift apart. Roselily’s new husband is a Black Muslim. He expects her to give him “Babies” …show more content…

Like Roselily’s Muslim husband, he demands his wife stay home and look after the household duties. He aspires to elevate her in his image of southern womanhood to maintain the beauty of her skin that he loves. He forces her to go shopping frequently and buy “the bottles of perfume, the skin softeners, the pots of gloss and eye shadow”. (Walker 24) In this way, he expects her to engage herself in the feminine activities to remain light-colored, fair and beautiful. Like Roselily, “she is also trapped by her husband and society’s view of woman, though her confinement is not within a black veil but in the decorative mythology of the southern lady,” states Barbara Christian. (88) Like a traditional man, he scoffs her writings and condemns it. It plants the seeds of conflict between the two and disturbs their relationship. The other man Mordecai Rich who loved her before her marriage takes this opportunity to exploit her further. He regards her sexual being, a prize to look on and an outlet to gratify his sexual demands. He flatters and appreciates Myrna’s creative impulse with the intention to consume her. He abuses her body, steals her stories and abandons her. He betrays her trust by publishing one of her …show more content…

It is “a nightmarish account of a black man who represses his rage before white people and turns it on his women” in the family. (Mickelson 158) The unnamed father fiercely loves his sister, Daughter in his childhood and unwittingly contributes in her destruction. Daughter is a “sexually free woman in a sexually repressive time” and does give away her love to the white man who enslaves her brother in the land and treats him worse than a beast. (Gillespie 221) When the family members discover the reason of her illness, they tie her to the bed and treat her worse “as if she were an animal.” (Walker 38) The family ostracizes Daughter for taking a white lover and punishes her severely. Would she have been a man, the family would not have treated her like a beast and driven her to death. Her father, the patriarch harshly beats her with his belt and does not let her set free. She knocks her brother down, the moment he sets her free and disappears in the night. She is found dead the next day on the fence post near the house. The father carries the brunt of his sister’s death all his life and vows not to trust any woman in future. After marriage, he victimizes his wife and punishes her severely. He cripples her down so that she cannot return to the imaginary advances of the landlord; he thinks she is engaged in. It compels her to end her life. The brutal cycle of

Get Access