International Journal of Advances in Arts ,Sciences and Engineering
ISSN:2320-6136
ISSN:2320-6144
The Child Collapse Society in Post-Modern World Based on Margaret’s View-Oryx and Crake.
V.Giri Prasad
Assistant Professor Of English
Kakatiya University-Ph.D Research Scholar
Swarna Bharati Institute Of Science & Technology, Khammam
vgiriprasad1979@gmail.com
Abstract:
This article is concerned with a long standing problem “Children privacy”. Children are the several manifestations which study we all learn from them. The genesis of the life
on the earth planet is to acquire joy and continue our joy up to last breath. In connection with this, look at the present world! The world with science and technology! The
world with big brothers! The world with terrorism! The world with muggers! The world with the addicts! The world with the paupers! The world with crazies! The
first part of the article attempts a rhetorical overview narrated in the novel oryx and crake, arguing parents discipline, parent’s responsibility, child privacy and family
environment. The second part of the article uses the method of spiritual strategies and pedagogue culture, Investigating solutions to prepare forth coming child generation be
obedient students, responsible husbands, and spiritual people.
KEY WORDS: Class, Gender, Pornography, Child Privacy, Genetics.
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario,
Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria
College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe
College. Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous
awards and honorary degrees. She is the author of more than fifty volumes of
poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for
her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale
(1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin,
which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Atwood's dystrophic novel, Oryx
and Crake, was published in 2003. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder
(short stories) both appeared in 2006. Her most recent volume of poetry, The
Door, was published in 2007. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the
Shadow Side of Wealth, part of the Massey Lecture series, appeared in 2008,
and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Ms.
Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi,
Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. In 2004 she coinvented the Long Pen. Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer
Graeme Gibson. Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada
from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian
Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. She and Graeme Gibson are the
Joint Honorary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within Birdlife International.
Ms. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of Pen International.
The novel orax and crake points out the collapse of the civilization if the genetie
engineering research will continue. In this novel, Margarate atwood clearly shows
the struggle of to be moral and to be good with the character of jimmy/snowman.
Jimmy is the Name who is a outward personality. Snowman’s the name who is a
inward personality. These two people are nothing but two consciousnesses in so
called the name jimmy. When crake is introduced in jimmy life. The protagonist
jimmy speaks in himself in the following lines
Snow man has trouble thinking of crake as glenn,so thoroughly
hascrakes later personal blotted out his earlier one.The crake side
of him must have been there from the beginning, thinks snowman:
there was never any real Glenn, Glenn was only a disguise.so in
Snowman’s reruns of the story, crake is never Glenn, and never
Glenn- alias-crake or crake / Glenn,or Glenn, later crake. He is
always just crake , pure and simple. (P.81)
The above paragraph is very clear to understand that jimmy doesn’t believe crake
but the gated communities into which house jimmy is born. The protagonist is
born into the compounds where in the successful and wealthy leave to ensure a
refuse from the “ pleeblands ”. Pleeblands which means arts, religion, morals,
ethics which are inhabitated by not only jimmy’s father and also plethora of people
in present senario are dominated by science and technology. The more
technology you practice, the more collapse in you.
Then they went to HottTotts, a global sex-trotting site. ” The next best thing to being
there,” was how it was advertised. It claimed to show real sex tourists, filmed while
doing things they’d be put in jail for back in their home countries. There faces weren’t
visible, there names weren’t used,but the posibilites for blackmail, snowman realises now,
must have been extensive. The locations were supposed to be countries were life was cheap
and kids were pleantiful, and were could buy anything you wanted. This was how the two
of them first saw orax.
Oryx was a girl in child pornography website in the novel. She was a small-boned
and exquisite, and naked, with nothing on her but a garland of flowers and a pink
hair ribbon, frequent props on the sex kiddie sites. She was on her knees, with
another little girl on either side of her, positioned in front of the standard
gargantuan Gulliver-in-Lilliput male torso-a life-sized man shipwrecked on an
island of delicious midgets, or stolen away andentranced,forced to experience
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agonizing pleasures by a trio of soulless pixies. This is how the children of
postmodern are getting spoil their lives’ with the vide usage of websites. I am fully
in supporting Margarate atwood who puts an axe against so called technology
and material life.In this novel, crake is the devil child character who can spoil
anybody or any child. Crake is the reason for the jimmy to have been practiced
pornography, drugs, sex etc...... Teens, especially girls, are increasingly sending
explicit, nude pictures of themselves to boys in order to compete for romantic
relationships. Experts explain that while those sending the messages think they
are reaching just one person, they don’t realize that the images proliferate among
friends and on the internet. The danger that sexual predators will collect them is
very real (Charle Boss,”Teen Girls Cell phone Invitations Bare All,”The Columbus
Dispatch, April 13,2008)
Oryx stands for the ample evidence of a financially obsessed society in the novel.
She was sold by her poor family into a life of sexual slavery. When jimmy is first
introduced to oryx as crakes girl friend. Jimmy / Snowman immediately
recognizes her as the adult version of a child he and crake had been especially
drawn to when watching child pornography as teenagers.
“His mother stuck her cigarette into her half empty coffee cup.
Come on jimmy, lets go for a walk”. She hauled jimmy up by
One wrist, closed the back door with exaggerated care behind
Them. (P.g: 23 )
In the novel, Jimmy frequently express feelings of guilt of many things, including
his parents` deteriorating marriage. When jimmy burnt his hair with a cigarette
lighter his parents got into a fight and his mother was blamed for having the lighter
in the house. As the text of the oryx and crake jumps back and forth from the past
to the present, the inward personality-Snowman narrates the story of how things
came to be. His narrative is filled with memories of the past, when he was a child
and live with his parents in the compound where his father worked. There is much
focus on his relationship with his mother and how he viewed her, and she
becomes very influential to jimmys personality and mentality construction.
All the childern in the world do like Snowman/Jimmy more and more in postmodern conditional society. Post-modern society will teach us how to cut our
throat with our own blade. What do I mean ? Post-modern society lacks ethics
and morals, they practice hypocrasy and double standard institutions. As a
starting point, i would like to stress that science is just half knowledge and we
need humanities because they transfer us from simple familiarity to higher
knowledge; more ever, they should even be more useful in the age of
technological and economic progress. Because with out them we would hardly
know which way to proceed since there are only discrete facts and ideas that
merely bewilder us. The biggest problem of the modern society is that it produces
an army of alienated, privatized, and uncultured experts who are knowledgeable
only with in very narrowly defined areas. Therefore, As far as my knowledge is
concerned, post-modern society do produce teen age people with child
pornography, drugs addicted society, muggers, alcoholic people, rapists etc.......
By and large, For a young woman from across cultures, receiving such news in a
country thousands of miles away from home can be unnerving to say the least. I
picked up the paper. I had first read of the incident on my way to Delhi and it had
saddened and angered me and sent me to my knees.Let me recapture the report
for you as briefly as I can. On the evening of Thursday the 22nd of August 2013 a
22 year old photojournalist and her male colleague entered a deserted mill
compound in the city of Mumbai. They were on an assignment to capture some
pictures for a magazine feature. Upon entering the place they were accosted by
two young men, pretending to be policemen, who asked if they had permission to
shoot. The two then took the woman and her colleague to another spot where,
along with three others, they tied the colleague to a tree and brutalized the young
woman. Media reports allege that they raped her five times that evening.
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International Journal of Advances in Arts ,Sciences and Engineering
One of the accused who was arrested allegedly told the police that the five had
committed similar crimes earlier and got away with it by recording video clips of
the victims to intimidate them.For those familiar with news in this country,
Thursday’s incident transported us to the 16th of December 2012 when a 23 year
old physiotherapy intern was raped by six men in a bus in our capital city. The
nation mourned and protested as that young woman, Nirabaya, battled the
physical consequences of having been brutally gang raped, injured and
abandoned. She died 13 days later unable to fight any more. Her sad story caught
our national imagination. It sent social activists on the warpath, the police force on
greater alert, the government on a string of protective measures, and the
perpetrators to prison.
Sadly since Nirabaya’s death the media has continued to report incidents of the
violation of women and children. The National Crime Records Bureau reports that
a woman is raped every 20 minutes somewhere in India. It also states that crimes
against women have increased by 7.1% nationwide since 2010, and that child
rape cases have increased by 336% in the last 10 years.As I sat down to write
today, I couldn’t escape the magnitude of those figures and their indictment upon
our moral condition as a nation. I also couldn’t help but recall the words of Indian
writer Shoba De from her article dated 24th August 2013 about the cold-blooded,
pre-meditated daylight murder of Narendra Dabholkar. The article was titled,
“Silencing the Rationalist” and hailed Dabholkar as a towering figure who was
appreciated all over India for his progressive worldview and his sustained
campaign against practitioners of black magic and…his strong views against
casteism. Shoba De observes in that article, “It is pretty difficult to shock India.
We have become ‘violence-proof’ as it were.”Weighty questions arise as we think
of these circumstances don’t they? Should the sheer frequency of such brutal and
inhuman violations be allowed to numb our moral senses that we be rendered
“violence-proof”? Can the logic, or shall we say “illogic” that a great amount of
wrong has the power to obliterate what is right, ever stand the test of truth? Does
apathy coupled with short-lived public memory only place the wounded in obituary
sections for the passing world to lay its flowers and candles and then walk away
to once again repeat its offenses?
At this moment there is an on-going debate about the age of one of the accused
in the Mumbai rape case. His family argue that he is under 17 and therefore by
provisions in the law does not stand punishable to the extent of the others. The
tragedy is that there seems to be no feeling of remorse or regret that one from the
family has so ravaged the innocence and personality of a young woman. “Blood is
thicker than water” as the old line goes, but what when blood is shed and pain
inflicted in so inhuman a fashion? That question may also speak for Egypt, Syria,
and other parts of our fragile world where violence abounds and so also
bloodshed.The Psalmist(The Bible) records a short line bearing deep implications:
“For your love is ever before me, and I will continually walk in your truth.”
For some of us love brings comfort, for others it brings security, for still others it
inspires service, but for the Psalmist it became the bedrock upon which his
convictions would stand. God’s love became his inspiration to walk in God’s truth
continually.
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ISSN:2320-6144
pornography. You may not have the moral right to speak in defense of
defenseless women (or for that matter, men), there are several people so called
women supporters but they are very cruel towards their wives. if you are unkind to
your spouse at home, You may not have the moral right to legislate against such
crimes, until you meditate upon the condition of your own soul. And when you do,
you must draw near to the one who says, “Come let us reason together…”
What margarate Atwood’s deep intention is that?
Each one of us must tread the path laid out before him,or her, says the voice
In his head, a man’s this time,the style bogus guru, and each path is unique.
It is not the nature of the path itself that should concern the seeker, but the grace
and the strength and patience with which and everyone of us follows the
sometimes Challenging.
The truth of God stands far above the vagaries of time, the whims of our cultures,
the “open-mindedness” of our scholars and the scepticism of our peers: It stands
in the One in whom “yesterday, today and forever” converge to spell “I AM.”
Until we see that truth, not in print as much as in our entire beings, our heads may
hang in shame not only for the violations and also jimmy’s pornography images,
crake type in human’s use to be discovered by genetic engineering research
that we read about in our newspapers but for the violations that dwell within our
hearts!
Work Cited:
1.Margarate Atwood, Oryx and Crake
2.Jameela, N.(2008). The autobiography of a sex worker, Translated by J.Devika.
Madras; West
land press.
3.Case Book study, Dr.O`Conner.
4.The Hindu News Paper Articles. (i) Sep 1st 2013,Salute the survivor by Kalpana
Sharma
(ii)
Sep 8th 2013,Teenager tries to rape 72-year-old women
5.RZIM Educational Trust, Atlanta.
Has it not struck you that if truth was ever anchored in us, we would end up
having about six billion versions of it? That’s why it is very critical for us to
understand that “truth” in the Christian worldview is not a concept nor a principle,
but a person. Jesus distinguished himself to that claim when he declared, “I am
the truth.”As I try to bring this reflection to a close, let me quote from what I
shared in one of my sermons from. There have been times when I have
counseled and prayed with men who had entered the dark world of pornography
with the excuse that their spouses were either “unkind or uncaring.” The step into
pornography was their violation, the alleged failure of the spouse, the justification!
I have appealed to such men that they would only find themselves deeper in the
quagmire of guilt and dirt and that there could be no moral justification for the
plunge they had taken. I have also gone further to tell them that the Holy God of
the Bible mercifully offers cleansing and forgiveness when he declares, “Come
now, let us reason together, though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as
white as snow.”
Yes, we can moralize not only jimmy/snowman and also the men who violated
that young photojournalist in Mumbai city. We can stand in rallies to protest and
cry for justice. We can appear to be on the right side of the right while all along
making compromises within ourselves that no one else or few others know about.
So, let me say it as clearly as one must hear it: You may not have much of a right
to charge the Mumbai offenders, if you are on the sly subscribing to or viewing
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