The Ring of Truth by Doniger Wendy;

The Ring of Truth by Doniger Wendy;

Author:Doniger, Wendy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00


Parental Imprinting and Uncertain Fathers

The tale of the Vizier’s daughter raises the issue of sexual deficiency. In other tales of clever wives that we have considered, too, the sexual rejection that the wives experience as the back of the man in bed or the empty pillow is also a dramatic expression of his sexual deficiency. The juxtaposition of rejection and rape in the Greco-Roman and Arabic tales that we have just considered reveals the sexual ambivalence of the man (and, in the case of Budur, the woman) who perpetrates the rape. Performance anxiety is often relieved by a subordinate woman with no legal connection, a woman of lower class (or caste, in the Indian examples) or another culture, the woman the clever wife often pretends to be. In such an encounter, the ring bears witness to the man’s performance and the woman’s pleasure.

If we consider the fear of inability to perform or of sexual deficiency as an ingredient in male rejection we may gain new insights into the relevance of the signet ring in these stories. For to the man’s fear of deficiency we must now add his uncertainty about the paternity of his son. When the husband in one South Indian variant that we have considered declares that he will shut his wife up, he says, “If I don’t, I wouldn’t be my father’s son.” It is surely significant that the scene in the Ramayana where Rama sends Sita away forever comes right after the moment when, shortly after he has brought her back from the island where the ogre Ravana has kept her captive for many years,xxvi he learns that she is pregnant.61 Is he worried that Ravana is the father? In Nina Paley’s contemporary retelling, Sita Sings the Blues, the Indian commentators on the soundtrack say, “Is Ravana the father?” And we see Rama looking at Sita’s womb and seeing a little Ravana in it.

“No one knows who your father is,” the children taunt the son of Muladeva;xxvii and that is the heart of the matter. Muladeva doesn’t know who the father of his son is, either. The men in these stories are desperate to find proof that they are in fact the fathers of the children that their wives bear, and with good reason: they believe that their own survival depends upon it. A Sanskrit text from perhaps as early as the eighth century BCE expresses the belief that the father actually is reborn as his son:

The father enters his wife; he becomes an embryo inside her, who is now his mother. In her he becomes new again and is born in the tenth month. And so the wife is called wife (jaya) because he is born (jayate) again in her.62

When the Indian lawmaker Manu repeats this over a thousand years later, he adds: “The wife brings forth a son who is just like the man with whom she makes love; that is why he should guard his wife zealously, in order to keep his progeny pure.



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