GENDERED DISCOURSE THROUGH PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY

Abstract

This paper aims to articulate the problem of relationship between an individual and society and its outreach through literary texts. I argue that the paradigms of interrelation of women, men, and society, particularly in the communities with pivotal patriarchal status have been directly adapted to the concepts and theories of society development. In the history of philosophy and sociology, various paradigms of society have been developed; the most popular among them are associating society with a bio-organism, analyzing society and an individual from an anthropological point of view, constructing a functionalist approach to this problem. J.J. Rousseau, Spinoza, Diderot, R. Merton, E. Durkheim for centuries have attempted to define a society and highlight its essential features. In this research, the problem is developing through the literary texts of the prominent Azerbaijan writer Anar and his literary characters, focusing on their moral and ethical priorities. As a basis for our research, we have chosen the Robert Merton’s structural functionalism approach. In addition, I agree with many scholars who believe that the movement of history has a spiral shape and at each turn of this spiral, the assessment of the individual by society is equivalent to the totality of values determined by society itself. It is accepted that the number of moral values is stable, but their combination is changing, corresponding to the Fibonacci Sequence, where spirals have a fixed proportion determining their shape (Vauclair 2009). I propose that in all patriarchal societies, the mode of perception of a woman by a man occurs at the level of his genetic memory. Moreover, the memory dictates him the same values as it was centuries ago. The code has not been changed since the period of the Lost Paradise. We will trace this formula of stable genetic memory and changing forms of assessment in a male-dominant society on the examples of the literary characters in Anar’s “White harbor” and Edgar Poe’s “Ligeia”.