Attitude Towards Women Fathers and Sons Essay

To analyze the attitudes towards the women question and the most useful starting point would be to look at the representation of the liberated fair sex, Yevdoxia Kukshina, which can be contrasted with the representation of Bazarovs mother or Nikolai Kirsanovs wife, the women ideals of the older generation. Kukshina is clearly meant to the representative of the radicalism of the 1850s to1860s, the progressive, advanced or educated woman nigilistka or anarchist woman (Richard Stites). She has vowed to defend the rights of women to the last drop of my blood and is scornful of Sand an out of date woman.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 simulated military operation among the Russian emancipees of the early 1860s.However, it is also quite obvious that while much has been written about Turgenevs attitude towards his nihilist hero, there is no doubt that the female nihilis t Kukshina is an unflattering caricature and as Walter Smyrniw quotes Turgenev has deliberately portrayed Kukshina as a ludicrous and repulsive emancipee. Walter goes on to argue that in his line drawing of Kukshina, Turgenev lampooned only certain undesirable tendencies generated by Russian emancipees. The worst among them was a lack of genuine involvement, an little commitment to the movement itself.Some merely assumed the roles of the emancipated women and hence their behaviour was both hokey and unnatural. Although many critics have argued along the same lines of Turgenevs portrayal of Kukshina as a device for chaff the progressive louse which Turgenev combed out of Russian reality (Dostoevsky) and that he has assumed the same judgement in respect to Russian men who merely assumed the pose of materialists and nihilists (eg. Sitnikov), it is hard to escape that in the description of her person and household we find some of the stereotyping of radical women found in most but toned-down writing.He did not hesitate in expressing value judgments when ridiculing the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of Russian women who merely play the role of emancipees. She is dirty and slovenly in her habits and person, her room is scattered and dusty, her hair disheveled and her dress crumpled. Moreover, her talk and behaviour is meant to picture us that her radicalism is shallow and unaffected. The narrator tells us that she greets her guests with a string of questions without waiting for answers. It is authorised to notice here the narrators generalization here, which would seem to impute lack of serious touch on (feminine casualness) to all women as part of their feminine nature and not to Kukshina as an individual. The narrator draws repeated care to Kukshinas unattractive physical appearance almost as if that were partly her fault.Kukshina is unfortunate enough to show her gums above her top teeth when she laughs and her piano playing revels her flat-cut fingernail s. However, what is most significant in terms of the predominate patriarchal ideology of the mid-nineteenth century Russia is her declaration, Im free, I have no children. From a ultraconservative perspective, this would count as near sacrilegious statement. Though Bazarov himself is a serious character, its possible to picture 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).