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Chapter Two Causes for the Alienation of Mothers

2.1 Mothers Under the Influence of Patriarchy

2.1.1 Mother as the Victim of Patriarchy

As Luce Irigaray claims that “motherhood is considered the only valuable destiny of  women  under  the  patriarchy,  which  means  women  shall  have  children,  thereby continuing the paternal lineage for the cultural rights of the husband, country, and the male”  (99).  Patriarchy’s  negative  influence  on  women  can  be  incorporated  in  many aspects. For example, women’s rights to education, work, property, and public life are exceedingly denied. But there is another noteworthy fact that most women lose their own subjectivity in a patriarchal society. Patriarchy is based on a dual structure, where there is a hierarchy between men and women. In such a structure, most women become marginalized. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir has analyzed women’s subjectivity loss in the patriarchal society and puts forward her theory of the Other. Beauvoir argues that “a woman is defined and determined with reference to her. He is the absolute, he is the essential—she  is  the  object,  she  is  the  Other”  (16).  Comparing  the  mothers  in  The Metamorphosis and Old Floating Cloud, we can also find that they are all the victims in the patriarchal society and lose their subjectivity due to patriarchy, contributing to their alienation. This part will analyze how the mothers are alienated because of their “the Other” identity. 

The idea of the Other was first advanced by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit. He maintains that the Other, as a constituent part of self-consciousness, completes the propositions of self-awareness. According to Hegel, when one is identified as a self, other people will be the other, the object, and the inessential. In 1949, Beauvoir adopted Hegel’s  conception  of  the  other  to  describe  the  male-dominated  society  in  which women as sexual-other to men, “particularly defined according to the particular manner in  which  the  One  chooses  to  set  himself  up”  (279).  Jessica  Benjamin  progresses  the Other  idea  and  holds  it  that  mother  becomes  the  other  for  men:  “It  is  precisely  this objectification,  combined  with  the  maintaining  absolute  difference  and  control,  that informs  the  master’s  transgression….  

2.2 Mothers Under the Crisis of Modernity

2.2.1 Mother Under the Force of Capital in The Metamorphosis

Capitalism  is  a  significant  component  of  modernity.  From  Marx’s  point,  the emergency  of  capitalism  and  the  revolutionary  bourgeoisie  is  the  foundation  of modernity. The crisis aroused by capitalism is also an important manifestation of the crisis of modernity. During Kafka’s age, the development of capitalism has been s本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。