Capitalism, Patriarchy and Women in John Irving’s The Cider House Rules

Abstract

This study intends to analyse the construction of the female body and women’s oppression in the capitalist and patriarchal society from the gender perspective and socialist feminist criticism. In John Irving’s The Cider House Rules (1985), there is a dialectical relationship between capitalism or profit-based systems and patriarchal social structures when it comes to the characters’ decision of not keeping children – and producing orphans or abortions – and the covert rules about the production of capital and family imposed by the twentieth-century society. The novel portrays the female body and women’s issues – motherhood, prostitution and abortion – as products or results of power-related structures: either through objectification or male dominance over women. These structures finally reveal how agency is a gendered and power-driven practice, governed by male characters who are sanctioned by patriarchal codes.