Assignment #11

In the short story ‘Punishment’ by Rabindranath Tagore, he illustrates or describes an incident that actually occurs in many places around the world to this day, maybe not to this extent but it does. In this story, the husband, Dukhiram comes home from work tired and exhausted, when he founds out that his wife, Radha has not made any food for him and that instead of serving him with delicious meals, she is replying with sarcasm as to how he didn’t bring home anything to cook so how can she make any food for him. All this probably triggered the misogynist inside him and out of rage, Dukhiram plunges his knife in the head of his wife Radha. Then later on, in the story, the other brother, Chidam wants his wife to take the blame for a crime that his brother committed. I think this all connects to Mary Wollstonecraft excerpt. In that excerpt Wollstonecraft talks about how in that time, it was normal for men to think that women are there just to please men and that if they fail to do so, they shall be disciplined roughly. Wollstonecraft says in the excerpt, in that era, women were merely housewives and most of them were uneducated, the men would go out in the world, get education, make money, generate wealth while the women would stay at home take care of the children, the kitchen and do whatever pleases their husband. The same thing can be seen happening in this story when Dukhiram and Chidam order their wives around and expect them to do whatever pleases them, not caring about how they might have felt. They were selfish and stubborn like the men described in Mary Wollstonecraft’s excerpt. In both, the story and the excerpt, men are seen as independent while women are dependent on them.