This post is going to be a bit different from usual. I want to talk more about a specific type of character, so the social revolution won’t be the main topic of this post. I am honestly wondering why characters, both male and female, end up having serious love and trust issues after being put into the system. I wonder this, because there is almost no variation between characters with a back-story of being raised in an orphanage.
The two main characters from Toni Morrison’s Recitatif, Roberta and Twyla, are just two examples. In this story we get to see them while they are living in the orphanage and after they’ve grown up. These girls, after growing up, meet frequently, but rather than acting like normal friends and talking about happy things, they get stuck on this traumatic event that occurred in their past. They keep going back to their memories of when an old lady working at the house, Maggie, was pushed down and attacked by other girls. Every time one of these conversations start up, the women become, suddenly, very sullen, afraid, and quite seemingly depressed. They seem to forget all the amazing things in their life and become trapped in that single memory.
This trauma seems to really stick out in Roberta’s case as well. She marries into money and lives an easy life, but it’s obvious she is not happy. It’s really easy to psycho-analyze her, because she is the “classic” case of a child from the system. She is avoidant of love as a result of abandonment, and is very materialistic because of all the hopes that were crushed during her childhood. She can’t trust anyone properly, except Twyla, because she was betrayed too often, and because she doesn’t think anyone can properly understand the pain she went through. It’s the paradigm case we see so often in system children – fictional characters at least.
To bring it back to the topic of the blog, I wanted to discuss this character archetype because of the difference between male and female characters in this kind of setting. As we have already seen, female characters have this kind of weakness brought out of them as result of their time in the system. Men, on the other hand, are portrayed as these violent and powerful characters – the bad boy. It’s strange that growing up in the same conditions would result in completely opposite responses, with the only difference being sex. It’s also strange to me that we don’t see many male orphan characters (I am excluding the Orphaned Heroes that are found so often in ancient myths). Perhaps it is my own fault that I haven’t seen many, but besides 1 or 2 movies with the lead being a male, every other orphaned character I have seen or read has been female.
It makes me wonder if this is the case because society is just so much more accustomed to seeing women in weaker states. Is it because it’s normal to see them on a lower rung of the social ladder, where they have to constantly and consciously wonder what type of person they are and whether they can trust others. I have only seen one exception to this rule of thumb so far. Her name is Emily, from “Once Upon a Time”. She is the main character of the television series, and from the very first episode we see a character that seems to fit the male mold of orphans more. To put it simply, she seemed badass. She was this very strong and independent character, who very much seemed like the lone wolf type. However as the series progressed we see this regression back into the wavering and weak-willed female character. After finding her son, who was also put into the system, she starts having these doubts about love. Soon she loses her initiative and seems to be more pulled along with the story than creating it. There are even multiple episodes devoted to figuring out the trauma she experienced as a child, and these episodes parallel very closely with the conversations between Twyla and Roberta.
It just pains me a little to see such a huge gap in personality in male and female characters, who share back-stories. It really does make it seem that Society is underestimating a women’s ability to handle her emotions and move on.