The Subjection of Wives and the Mother in Bapsi Sidhwa's The Bride

 The Bride (1983) encountered three brides in the novel Afshan, Carol, and Zaitoon. Afshan and Qasim settle down after some years. Qasim still teased Afshan but in a gentle way. (6)

            In Mill’s time, women were considered no better than a slave even inferior to them. In the United States, they were given African slaves and they considered that these slaves were given to them by heaven, and these slaves shouldn’t get any freedom. The same belief of slave owners is also applied to brave and strong ones when they believe it is their right to have power over women. As the owners, men believe that women should not get any freedom and that is the reason women are being subjected to men. Mill’s stance illustrates that women are being subjected as a slave to their life partners.

I mean, to those who haven’t been able to find any other basis for their favored form of tyranny. Conquering races hold it to be Nature’s own dictate that the feebler and more unwarlike races should submit to the braver and more manly, or, to put it more bluntly, that the conquered should obey the conquerors. (7)

The second bride in the novel was Carol, a girl from a different land, who was married to Farukh in the United States and had come to Pakistan with him. She too becomes the victim of this subjection. After her marriage to Farukh, she came to Karakorum Land from Lahore. Firstly, she falls prey to Major’s sexual desire and lately was found that she was only an ‘object of desire for Major when he shows his ignorance towards marrying her. Major was just considering her as a slave. He was playing with her body and emotions only and was not ready to marry her. He further rejects her saying, I have the family I can’t marry you if you want to stay in this secret affair, it’s up to you now. Mushtaq’s words reveals the true condition of the female. She has now realized that she was just being subjected in the name of love. “For the first time, Carol knew the dizzy, humiliating slap of pure terror. The obscene stare stripped her of her identity. She was a cow, a female monkey, a gender opposed to that of a man – charmless, faceless, and exploitable” (Sidhwa 109). Females have been labored, tortured, subjected, and later killed at the hands of their male equivalents. In the tribal society, they have different codes that are set in the male chauvinism society where men and women are equally responsible for a crime but only women get punished. For example, when Carol asked Major about Farukh’s reaction to her secret affair, ‘Do you think Farukh would kill me?’ ‘Who knows? I might if you were my wife.’ Major replied. (Sidhwa 206)

Major’s answer no doubt hurts her badly. A great deal was solved suddenly. She actually came to know that she has been subjected to his personal desires. He was loving her just for his commands over her body.

So that’s all I mean to you, she said. That’s really what’s behind all the gallant and protective behavior I’ve loved so much here, isn’t it? I felt very special, and all the time I didn’t matter to you any more than that girl does as an individual to those tribals, not any more than a bitch in heat. You make me sick. All of you. (Sidhwa 207)

Farukh interprets his wife’s American ways as an expression of sexual desires. He was born in a sexually repressive society and treats her wife in the same way. In the tribal areas, where even looking into a man’s eyes carries sexual desires. Carol’s frankness with other men drives Farukh to madness, “I am so ashamed of you . . . you laugh too loudly. You touch men. Don’t you know if you look a man in the eye, it means he can have you?” (Sidhwa 110)

Carol and Farukh’s marriage was not a forced one but a marriage of love and Carol came to Pakistan with him. Farukh was well-known for her living style in America but when she becomes his, he wants total control over her mind and body. He wants to keep her as a slave who only serves him. Before ages, Mills stated his point of view about marriage and slavery as,

Men want not only the obedience of women but also their sentiments. All but the most brutish of men want to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a •forced slave but a •willing one, not a slave merely but a favorite. So, they have done everything they could to enslave women’s minds. The masters of all other slaves get obedience through fear, either of themselves or of some religious punishment. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to get what they wanted. (9)

Sakhi’s mother Hamida represents the subjection of women at every stage of life. When Hamida tries to stop Sakhi from beating an ox, Sakhi gets furious and starts beating his own mother. “I’ll teach you, ‟he hissed, I’ll teach you meddling woman.” A woman wailed from a distance, “for God’s sake stop it…. you’ll kill her” (Sidhwa 156). Every male member of society wants to control the female figure in their house either his mother, daughter, or wife. Furthermore, Hamida’s deep scars on the cheeks and her toothless mouth indicate that she had been beaten many times. Society, being codified by man, verdicts that woman is lower than man. Legally she has been given equal rights with men, but the submissive and gentle nature of women rooted deeply in their psyche did not disturb the male dominance in the family. In patriarchal societies, if she attempts to change this medium of domination versus submission in the man-woman relationship, she finds herself in trouble. Mill exemplified this as,

The truth is that people of the present and the last two or three generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive condition of humanity. The only ones who can form any mental picture of what society was like in ancient times are the few who have •studied history or have •spent much time in parts of the world occupied by the living representatives of ages long past. People don’t know to realize how entirely, in former ages, the •law of superior strength was the •rule of life, and how publicly and openly it was proclaimed. (5)

The subjection of women is further exemplified through Zaitoon and Sakhi’s forced marriage. As Sakhi wants to be a real man by controlling his wife and bringing her under domination. Women are shown as a territory to conquer by men. Sakhi punishes Zaitoon just for talking to the Punjabi Jawan as he was secretly watching them. As in the novel:

Sakhi was seething with jealousy...the Jawan’s grip on the girl’s arm, her laughter, and ease in his company - the persistent vision inflamed him. ‘Why did you let him touch you?’ He hissed, turning dangerously. ‘I saw you,’ he shouted, ‘I saw the Jawan hold your arm all the way down the river. Sakhi’s face was contorted with fury. ‘You laughed together as if you were lovers. I could hear you all the way across the river, cried Sakhi, burying his face in his hands. (Sidhwa 169)

And yet the wife is the actual bondservant of her husband: so far as the law is concerned, she is as subordinate to him as slaves, commonly so-called, are to their masters. She promises life-long obedience to him at the altar, and is legally held to that all through her life. . .. She can do no act whatever without his at least tacit permission. I’m not claiming that wives are in general no better treated than slaves, but no slave is a slave to the same extent and in the full sense of the word as a wife is. Hardly any slave. . . .is a slave at all hours and all minutes; in general, he has his fixed task, and when it is done, he disposes up to a point of his own time and has a family life into which the master rarely intrudes. (17)

Mill further argues that slavery shouldn’t exist in the world of marriage. Marriage should be on equality between men and women. Equality in marriage would be beneficial for both parties and for society’s progress as well. But at that time women must be killed by their partners if she demands equality or goes for it. “A wife had no such power and if she had, it would almost always be desirable that she should avail herself of it only as a last resort” (22). The same kind of statement was encountered in The Bride (1983), “There was only one punishment for a runway wife. Wordlessly, the men organized their hunt and walked into the twilight-shrouded mountains” (174).

According to Ahmad, Sidhwa portrayed a real story of a girl from the mountains who have been taken to the tribe and married there to the cousin of her father as her father has promised his cousin. The marriage was definitely without the consent of the daughter. In the wild mountains, the young lady had been subjected to such severity and unremitting hardship that she had fled into the trackless mountains through which the Indus River keeps running in liberated superbness. As indicated by the strict code of respect by which her husband and his clan lived without some other law, this demonstration couldn't be pardoned; she was chased down like a creature and her headless body had been discovered drifting in the shallows of the river (Ahmad 6). But Sidhwa in her story changed the directions. She has made a way for her protagonist to run away and save her life from the brutal codes of the mountains. She was unable to bear more pain than Sakhi was giving her on daily basis. She has beaten abruptly and was a victim of verbal violence as well. She has been subjected to various sorts of dominance and violence. Justified through the lines,

Skimming the boulders in vast strides, Sakhi seized her. He dragged her along the crag. ‘You whore,’ he hissed. His fury was so intense she thought he would kill her. He cleared his throat and spat full in her face. ‘You dirty, black little bitch, waving at those pigs…’ Gripping her with one hand he waved the other in a lewd caricature of the girl’s brief gesture. ‘Waving at that shit-eating swine. You wanted him to stop and fuck you, didn’t you!’ (Sidhwa 169)

Mill compares marriage to politics and argues,

When we are thinking about slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are shown pictures of loving submission to it on the other- superior wisdom ordering all things for the greatest good of the dependents and surrounded by their smiles and benedictions. All this is simply irrelevant...Who doubts that there may be great goodness, happiness, and affection under the absolute government of a good man? But law and institutions should be adapted not too good men but to bad. Marriage is not an institution designed for a selected few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power. (Mill 14) 

Mill uses ‘society’ in such a way that a married couple constitutes a society, so marriage must be equal. As he states in his essay “The Subjection of Women” (1869),

How can any society exist without government? In a family as in a state, some person must be the ultimate ruler. When married people differ in opinion, who is to decide? They both can’t have their way, but a decision one way or the other must be reached. (Mill 22)

Apart from this, instead of remaining subject to the patriarchal society Zaitoon has made herself free from man-made cultures. It's a culture that privileges men to promote gender discrimination. The subjection of Zaitoon leads her to escape from her husband’s house and becomes a victim of rape. “A couple of bastards from Cheerkhil raped her” (Sidhwa 206). Zaitoon’s subordination becomes a reality with the sexual experiences that she gets from both her husband and the rapist. Mill talks about women's submissiveness as they themselves are the reason for their subjection.

It will be said that •the rule of men over women differs from all these others in not being a rule of force, that it is accepted voluntarily, •that women don’t complain, and are consenting parties to it. Well, the first point to make is that a great number of women do not accept it. Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known through their writings (the only form of going public that society permits to them), increasingly many of them have protested against their present social condition; and recently many thousands of them, headed by the most eminent women known to the public, petitioned Parliament to allow them the vote. (8)

As far as concerned with Carol just recollects the plight of women around the world but Zaitoon doesn’t just speak but made her mind free. Mill’s essay also identifies such a rebellious stance,

The chivalrous ideal is the high point of women’s influence on the moral development of mankind, and if women are to remain in subjection it is lamentable that the chivalrous standard has passed away because it’s the only standard that has any power to alleviate the demoralizing influences of the subjection of women. (51)

According to Mill, it’s just a woman who can stand against her subjection. No one can save woman but it’s the woman herself who saves her from the subjection of men as indicated in the novel The Bride (1983). Mill renders in “The Subjection of Women” (1869),

The only rebellion against established rules that are viewed in that way today is that of women against their subjection. A woman who joins in any movement that her husband disapproves, of makes herself a martyr, without even being able to be an apostle, for the husband can legally put a stop to her apostleship. Women can’t be expected to devote themselves to the emancipation of women until a considerable number of men are prepared to join them in the undertaking. (46)