Abortion and the single woman as literary tropes in the works of Amos Oz — Page 2:
6 To put it differently, the social construction of gender is still driven by a patriarchal conceptual apparatus which articulates androcentric stereotypes in the portrayal of female protagonists. Thus, Female characters are infantilised and devalued, as well as distinguished from men, by having they’re entire being generically defined purely in the sexual realm. Greer underscores the importance of this phenomenon when she writes: "The universal sway of the feminine stereotype is the single most important factor in male and female woman-hatred" (261).
Abortion
7 While the very core of the passionate debate and struggle about abortion has chiefly been a social and political question that has lead to a smorgasbord of discourse and critiques dealing with this operative polemical issue, abortion and its literary manifestation have been, for the most part, unexplored in Israeli fiction and never, to our knowledge, in the stories of Amos Oz.
8 The conflation of abortion and literature bears special relevance to the critic for, as Wilt states, "The confines of art are no less grotesque and complicated than the purlieus of life when it comes to abortion. But at least the truth of the author's intention and his/her achievement remains stable enough to be looked at and argued over" (XI). Indeed, the examination of the intermingling of abortion and fiction has particular salience to Feminist theory and practice as evocatively encapsulated in Ellen Willis's declaration that, "Abortion is first of all the key issue of the new right's antifeminist campaign, the ground on which a larger battle over the very idea of a woman's liberation is fought" (12). In a similar vein, Komisar argues that the question of abortion…is closely tied to the attitude that men have traditionally held about women as people as sexual being” (82). The representation of abortion has been referenced by a constant barrage of negative attacks mirroring the crusade launched by the assortment of Right to Life movements and the Religious Bloc- forces that have attempted to promote the idea that the exercise by women of this reproductive freedom carries with it a moral taint.
9 Compositionally, the literary portrayal of abortion resonates with the bulwark of sexist oppression that characterises male authored texts: a historicized de-legitimization of images of women as models of self determination, possessing power and sexual autonomy and the foregrounding of the retrograde patriarchal belief that innately women are helpless victims who must be denied the right to choose. At heart, male writers seek to rework an old pattern of opposition to reproductive freedom by employing antiabortion iconography and concepts in a thematic strategy to elide positive female representations from their texts, embedding instead de-stabilizing messages aped from anti choice dirges. As Susan Faludi explains, in the backlash climate, abortion was has become a "[...] moral litmus test to separate the good women from the bad" (133).
10 In almost every regard, Oz's narratives reinforce pre-existing traditional dominant ideologies of the antiabortion campaign, with his sub-plots functioning as homilies to denounce women who had abortion. Noticeably absent are an evenhanded debate and a pluralistic vista articulating the divergent views involved. A pronounced failure to delineate the main factors in the crucible of the abortion controversy defines his narrative. Certainly, the attitude towards abortion disclosed in the narrative is inextricably linked to a disapproval of women's emancipation. In Oz, it is masculine cultural conventions that ground the norms of textual representations, establishing one unified position and excluding any reconciliation of the different subjective beliefs nuancing the discussion. Now, it would be foolhardy to maintain that the decision and process is the same for all, and does not carry with it a multifarious assemblage of emotions and responses. However, the texts to be discussed tend to reject any notion that abortion encompasses a multiplex of experience and is "[...] personal to each circumstance and affects each individual differently," (Francke 43) and thus escapes any monolithic construction.