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Daughter as accommodator and second mother

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Daughter as accommodator and second mother

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The featured texts are uncomfortable and distinct yet familiar illustrations that expose how these aspects of the anak na dalaga along with gender culminate in the figure of the daughter as accommodator and second mother. Her role as accommodator is twofold: she must provide for the family at the extreme expense of her self-determination, dignity, and humanity but do so without appearing capable enough and threatening to supersede man. As the household’s second mother she inherits the heavy domestic responsibilities from her mother even while this parent still lives. She is defined by these duties to her family in which she is immanent and from which she is only able to escape through extreme measures. Ultimately, however, these texts indicate that she finds only a fleeting escape and cannot simply withdraw from the disadvantages that are facets of her identity, that it is not individual actions that would free her from her oppressive conditions but systemic change.

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Mother as enabler and perpetrator of patriarchal oppression

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Mother as enabler and perpetrator of patriarchal oppression

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In the two short stories, mothers very distinctly hold their daughters to their duties and are portrayed as voices for patriarchal oppression, figures of internalized misogyny. Indeed mothers are made to appear as an active head of the patriarchal family structure that kickstarts the gender-based oppression of the anak na dalaga, but also come across as misguided actors for being themselves confined in such a structure.

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What might the girl in Generations mean by saying “I have the right”? The right to what, and why (and how) does she claim it, especially considering that this dialogue follows her abrupt and brutal murder of her father?

How does this story depict the conditions that a Filipina peasant girl faces and how she might attempt to escape or fix them? Trace the intersectionality of her identity.

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To what extent are the mothers of the narrator, Mayang, and Poloy responsible for Mayang’s oppressive conditions? Are they the masterminds behind these, whether unwillingly or otherwise? Why or why not?

1. As depicted by the story, how might women enable or perpetrate gender bias and discrimination against their own gender, both in a family setting and the wider society?

2. How do the aspects of race and ethnicity, class, and age play into Mayang’s female identity and her hardships?

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How might any or all of the girl’s “[t]hree faces to wear” in “Order for Masks” explain the predicaments each of the daughters in Ginamos and Generations face, for example:

1. Mayang’s situation in contrast to what Poloy experiences

2. the final conversation the girl in Generations has with her father?

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These texts account for only a few that may continue the struggle for worldwide visibility of the young Filipina and her familiar yet unique experiences especially from the grassroots level, so that less monolithic perceptions of the overarching feminist movement and feminist literature in the English language may be promoted and achieved. The substantial reflections or expressions created by such literary works and their productive reception would encourage their inclusivity into the literary canon. Simply due to how much it is experienced in real life, spaces must be created in the literary canon holding more portraits of intersectionality to match.

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Amorsolo, Fernando. Bathing by the river. 1939. https://www.artnet.com/artists/fernando-amorsolo/bathing-by-the-river-JVGaq_jnI1FQm3X-p7Y7_g2

Amorsolo, Fernando. Under the Mango Tree. 1935. https://news.abs-cbn.com/ancx/culture/art/11/19/21/how-amorsolo-fans-sought-his-works-pre-internet.

Buongiorno, Donatus. Interior Scene with Young Girl Washing Dishes. https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Interior-Scene-with-Young-Girl-Washing-D/88E3B8380BD494D8

Elatab, Said. 3 faces Painting. https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-3-faces/999247/3673010/view

Martin, Isabel Pefianco. “American Education and Philippine Literature.” Philippine Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 2001, pp. 113–22. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42634438.

Moreno, Virginia. “Order for Masks.” A Native Clearing: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English Since the '50s to the Present: from Edith L. Tiempo to Cirilo F. Bautista, edited by Gémino H. Abad, University of the Philippines Press, 1993, pp. 145-46.

Paulma, Ma. Elena. "Ginamos." Diliman Review, vol. 65, no. 1, 2021, pp. 152-59, https://journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/dilimanreview/article/view/3757/3454.

Rosca, Ninotchka. “Generations.” The Likhaan Anthology of Philippine Literature in English from 1900 to the Present, edited by Gémino H. Abad et al, University of the Philippines Press, 1998, pp. 297-306.

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Compare and contrast the roles that the girl in “Order for Masks” performs for her Brother, Father, and Seducer.

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In this slow burn of a peasant-class family tragedy, a young girl who sees the possibility of a better life in her developing beauty is given the responsibility over her abusive and negligent father by her mother, which only brings her to a sexually coercive situation and then a violent awakening and retaliation.

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The eldest daughter bears the brunt of a conservative Filipino family—motherlode of gender bias, belief in American exceptionalism, sex-negative norms, passing on of well-earned accountability, and general hypocrisy—most starkly painted by Paulma’s Ginamos in all its awful glory.

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“Order for Masks” (1954) by Virginia Moreno

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“Order for Masks” (1954) by Virginia Moreno

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A fitting primer on the theme and the subsequent texts, Moreno’s “Order for Masks” enumerates the roles in life a girl and/or woman performs “[f]or the three men in [her] life”: antithetical sister, chaste daughter, and “[n]ewly loved” object of affection.

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Intersectionality with the 𝒂𝒏𝒂𝒌 𝒏𝒂 𝒅𝒂𝒍𝒂𝒈𝒂

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Intersectionality with the 𝒂𝒏𝒂𝒌 𝒏𝒂 𝒅𝒂𝒍𝒂𝒈𝒂

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Using this collective of texts, we take the state of daughterhood as a lens into the woman experience discerned in the Filipina setting. No matter how hyperspecific she may seem, the anak na dalaga figure offers universal truths surrounding the Other. She does not stop at being the root and an intersection of the Filipino woman experience as a whole, but also brings intersectionality into the picture. These texts highlight this nature of her identity, adding breadth to her evidently gendered experiences, through its facets of race and ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and age aside of course from gender. With these aspects so vividly exposed by this lens of reading, two most striking figures arise for the reader to consider: the anak na dalaga as accommodator and second mother to the family, and the mother as an enabler and perpetrator of patriarchal oppression.

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To say that Filipinos are a colonized and exploited people is an understatement. We endured centuries of colonial subjugation, being passed from one imperialist superpower to another. Colonial governments that were established on our lands had at their hearts and as their basis the erroneous notion that our Filipino race and ethnicity puts us at a natural disadvantage and renders us inferior to their colonizers. While this way of thinking is far from being a popular and supported notion at present, Filipinos evidently have not ceased looking outwards and finding there the quintessential realization of prosperity. The story Ginamos especially features how deeply rooted in a Filipino family’s way of life this frame of mind is, so much so that it creates a family duty rather unique to a nubile daughter such as what is expected of Mayang.

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Our colonization by foreign powers has not only served as a source for such implications relating to race and ethnicity, but also as cracks in between socioeconomic classes to keep them as divided and distinct from one another as possible, together with corrupt Filipino government leaders themselves especially epitomized by the great robbery of the Marcoses. They exploited Filipinos of their natural resources, kept them from these, and left them to make do with what is left. This financial wanting is a significant factor in the family from Ginamos but most especially that from Generations, being the latter story’s very structure underlying its series of conflicts and a defining component of the girl’s character both in her aspirations and her depredation.

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It starts them young—the patriarchy does. It is what their family raises their girls with, the impetus of their growth and socialization into the wider community, what ages them. Youth enables for girls two venues of vulnerability as depicted in the texts: the exercise of filial piety and the transformational process of puberty. Consistent with real life, Filipino girls like many children develop the early understanding of the unspoken rule to be obedient to their parents and other older relatives, never mind if to their own aversion and at their own expense. Puberty, on the other hand, tends to be used against them as a tool for their non-consensual sexualization by predators, which they may grow aware of early on like the girl from Generations appears to. They are almost trained to be accustomed to feeling unsafe, to normalize just stomaching the unsafe situations they find themselves in until they break.

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These texts are fruits of the American educational system established in the Philippines during the onset of these Westerners’ occupation of the islands. As elucidated in “American Education and Philippine Literature,” Filipinos were taught the Anglo-American canon, while their native languages and literature were stifled through their exclusion from classrooms and the curricula for decades (113-14). Their literary tradition and standards were directly handed over to us to inherit and abide by. This influence is evident especially in “Order of Masks,” which makes a reference (the Billiken) and quite infamous allusion derived from the Anglo-American (literary) space through the tale of Philomela and King Lear. These works of Philippine literature in English continue and are intertwined with the Anglo-American tradition merely by inheriting its writing style through such literary devices and the adoption of the English language. However, these texts are notably just as identifiable with Filipino experiences, thus must ultimately be regarded as works with intersecting identities in the way its characters experience intersectionality. They echo and add to the observations, experiences, and discourse regarding the woman experience not only in the Western sphere but across nations.