The Eternal Feminine

While reading gender in The Eternal Feminine by Rosario Castellanos, it is implied that women are inferior to men. Castellanos does a great job of pulling important gender issues into the script through sarcasm and the use of powerful women in history. The play is almost a parallel to the idea of feminism and how it has evolved over the years.
The play is set in a beauty salon in the culturally patriarchal Mexico. The main character, Lupita, is about to be married and is getting her hair done. A salesperson comes to promote a new hair dryer that keeps women from getting bored. If women become bored they, “without realizing it, might begin to think,” and if women think, they may become independent of men as witnessed through feminism (Castellanos 276). The initial setting of the play sets women up to look like fools that should only care about appearance and not attempt to think about anything beyond it because it is the male’s job to think.
In Bell Hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, it explains that women began to learn about feminism through groups before literature and educational courses were created on the subject (19). By putting the setting of the play in a beauty salon, Castellanos gives the illusion of a group setting because there are many women holding conversations in a confined area.
Throughout the play, Castellanos takes Lupita through a series of dreams with a hairdryer that induces these dreams. The salesperson gives the women a sense of control by telling them that they have control over the topics of each dream. This convinces them that they should try it. Later, when asked if this process is a risk, the sales person gets offended because they are questioning him. It brings up the idea that a woman should not question a man, because the male is in charge. Having the play set in a patriarchal society adds to the set-up for these ideas. Hooks says that, “males as a group have and do benefit the most from patriarchy, from the assumption that they are superior to females and should rule over us,” which proves that the salesperson is a figure of male dominance in the play (ix).
One of Lupita’s dreams is of her honeymoon. In her culture, it’s a compliment to a man if his newlywed wife acts as if she doesn’t like sex. Lupita says, “ it seemed repugnant, disgusting,” and Juan replies, “Thanks, Lupita. I knew you weren’t going to fail me in the moment of truth.” It is a sign of male exploitation towards females as if the male is the only one that should gain from the experience, and it’s the female’s duty to give their life partner that experience.
To continue the paralleling between the play and the feminist evolution, Castellanos changes the setting of the dreams to have historical women speak to Lupita. “Producing a body of feminist literature coupled with the demand for the recovery of women’s history was one of the most powerful and successful interventions of contemporary feminism,” says Hooks proving that Castellanos using the historical women as a teaching tool is paralleling the evolution of feminism throughout her play (20). Not only does Castellanos use these women who were intelligent and powerful to parallel feminism, but she also brings up historical feminist issues such as clothing, birth control, and divorce as in the end of Act III the ladies in the salon are speaking on all of these feminist issues.