Part 2 Camille (Yifei) Labels

Equality, which is promised in the idea of the American Dream, has always been just a dream due to the human nature of labeling like what I have talked about in Part 1. Aside from racism, the ignorance of female power remained to be a serious and neglected problem until recent decades. The idea of women being too weak both physically and mentally has been held by whatever gender. Controlled by subconsciousness, the act of labeling is hard to avoid or even realize. For women, without being aware of their power, most of them followed the flow of society and gave up their promised equal right of opportunity.

Labeling not only reinforced the gender stereotype, it also gives female the idea that choosing to use their body to get benefits is OK. Take Myrtle for an example, instead of at least give it a try at working hard with her husband to achieve her dream, she rather seduced Tom to make herself appear rich. She was basically using her body as an object and the attraction of her became something so simple as the sexual appeal.

Society’s stereotype due to labeling has made all efforts became barely useful. Women were expected to be nothing but pretty and any feature they might have is so restricted in the range that their label has defined them. The book did not expand the background of Myrtle, but there is this possibility that she just gave up the attempt of being more than just sexy and fighting against the flow. Then just as any other female characters in the book, she gave in because it was impossible for society to change for her. There was hardly anything left apart from her pretty shell in the end. But just like any other person living in a society, she grew up learning the definition of gender and rules of being a female. All that learning slowly became part of who she was, serving for her subconsciousness by effecting labels she put on others and herself. There is nothing wrong with her being the way she is because her struggle under the setting of society would only cause her pain. Choosing to ignore the existence of a possible chance is not really a good way of living but sometimes life is about surviving. She had to abandon her possible inner strength because only by living without that could she fit in and survive.

Equality is smashed into pieces under this condition. Women even lost their right and awareness to be themselves, to be a human as complex as she can be. Their identity had been ripped. The only way for them to approach the American Dream is by being “simple” and let men do the work. There was no right of being more than a fool, let alone equal opportunity of realizing the dream. We could say Myrtle achieve her American Dream if what she ever wanted was just money, sex and being stuporous. She got all this in a pretty tragic way though. Only when society changes and people start to realize the harm of being so objective on judging others, can this tragedy be avoided.