Gender Roles in Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness

             In his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz revisits an underlying issue including in his novel My Michael: gender roles and their emotional and mental consequences. The issue is most explicitly addressed by Amos’ Aunt Sonia, his mother’s younger sister. She claims that girls of her time were “brainwashed” into accepting their roles as women (180). And these roles were strongest for mothers: Sonia was “always taught that women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home--but only until the children are born” (178). While all kinds of “notions of freedom” were being discussed while Sonia, Fania, and Haya were adolescents, Sonia argues that no freedom was brought “between him and her” (181). Instead, women continued to live in a silent torture, “walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on” (180).

                The theme of gender roles takes on great significance in A Tale of Love and Darkness as it is offered as a contributing factor to Amos’ mother’s suicide. Though readers may not hear directly from Fania, her own frustration with stereotypical gender roles is evidenced in a story recounted by Sonia. She remembers a painting hanging in her family’s dining room of a young girl whose underskirts were showing; it “seemed modest but it wasn’t really” (185). One day, Fania exploded about the painting, saying that the image naively “ignore[d] suffering” (186). The painting misrepresented and minimized the hard work and plight of the young peasant woman. Sonia draws a more direct correlation between Fania’s suicide and the overbearing oppression of gender roles when she tearfully laments: “Every time I remember that prettified picture, every time I see a picture with three underskirts and a feathery sky, I see scorpions ravaging my sister and I start to cry” (186). The image Sonia uses to embody women’s suffering in general is applied to her deceased sister.

While there have been “freedoms” brought to the issues “between him and her,” stereotypes about gender and gender roles continue to serve as stifling forces (181). Even in the relatively egalitarian and secularized setting of the United States in the twenty-first century, one can feel the societal and cultural pressures to behave in certain ways and make certain decisions based on gender. The lamentations of Aunt Sonia in A Tale of Love and Darkness both voice the loss felt by oppressed women and remind me of the opportune advances that have been made from which I benefit today.