Attitude Towards Women Fathers and Sons Essay

To analyze the attitudes towards the women question and the most useful starting signal point would be to look at the representation of the liberated woman, Yevdoxia Kukshina, which shag be contrasted with the representation of Bazarovs mother or Nikolai Kirsanovs wife, the women ideals of the previous(a) generation. Kukshina is clearly meant to the representative of the radicalism of the 1850s to1860s, the progressive, advanced or educated woman nigilistka or nihilist woman (Richard Stites). She has vowed to defend the rights of women to the last drop of my blood and is lordly of Sand an out of date woman. She has separated from her husband and plans to go abroad to study in Paris and Heildelberg. She thus, personifies the emergence of new objectives and tactical manoeuvre among the Russian emancipees of the early 1860s.However, it is also quite obvious that while very much has been written about Turgenevs attitude towards his nihilist hero, there is no doubt that the female nihilist Kukshina is an unflattering caricature and as Walter Smyrniw quotes Turgenev has advisedly portrayed Kukshina as a ludicrous and repulsive emancipee. Walter goes on to implore that in his portraiture of Kukshina, Turgenev lampooned only certain undesirable tendencies generated by Russian emancipees. The worst among them was a lack of genuine involvement, an inadequate commitment to the military campaign itself.Some merely assumed the roles of the emancipated women and hence their behaviour was both contrived and unnatural. Although many critics have argued along the same lines of Turgenevs portrayal of Kukshina as a device for irony the progressive louse which Turgenev straighten out out of Russian reality (Dostoevsky) and that he has assumed the same survey in respect to Russian men who merely assumed the incur of materialists and nihilists (eg. Sitnikov), it is hard to escape that in the description of her person and household we take some of the stereotyping of ra dical women found in most conservative writing.He did not hesitate in expressing value judgments when ridiculing the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of Russian women who merely played the role of emancipees. She is dirty and slovenly in her habits and person, her populate is scattered and dusty, her hair disheveled and her dress crumpled. Moreover, her conversation and behaviour is meant to set up us that her radicalism is shallow and unaffected. The narrator tells us that she greets her guests with a string of questions without time lag for answers. It is important to notice here the narrators generalization here, which would bet to impute lack of serious concern (feminine casualness) to all women as dowry of their feminine nature and not to Kukshina as an individual. The narrator draws repeated heed to Kukshinas unattractive physical appearance almost as if that were part her fault.Kukshina is unfortunate enough to show her gums above her top teeth when she laughs and her so nant playing revels her flat-cut fingernails. However, what is most significant in terms of the dominant paternal ideology of the mid-nineteenth century Russia is her declaration, Im free, I have no children. From a conservative perspective, this would count as near sacrilegious statement. though Bazarov himself is a serious character, its possible to read Sitnikov as a parody of the younger generation. At Madame Kukshins, the narrator tells us To Sitnikov the chance to be scathing and express contempt was the most agreeable of sensations (13.44).