Month: February 2026

Categories
The Time Of The Doves

Another Erased-Agency Female Character :,((

??? Why are all those lovers (that we have read) so toxic??

Natalia’s identity and self is being gradually erased during the marriage and the war.

Firstly, I think she places too much value on Quimet. Because of a date with him, she begins thinking about him while at work and ends up making mistakes. When Quimet arrives a full hour late, instead of questioning or scolding him, she assumes that she must have misremembered the time. And when they talk, most of the conversations are around Quimet.

This makes me start to think whether she neglects her own self and agency too much, and she almost lost her own internal voices. She hardly expresses her anger nor resists directly, instead, she keeps endures and tolerates, everything she feels uncomfortable would be swallowed by herself. This is a form of internal oppression, and this is not imposed solely through external force, but through a gradual process in which she comes to believe this is the only way that she can live.

From Quimet changes her name to Colometa as a start, she is gradually away from her own identity. From my perspective, this is not a romantic nickname, but an act of power dominance. Since a name is a core of one self and one’s sense of identity, and the one who names you actually defines you. Quimet gives her a name, and she neither refuses nor resists, this makes me feel like he is dominant to Natalia, and their relationship is in a hierarchy.  From this, her subjectivity is already not self-determined, and moreover, the name “Colometa” itself diminishes her. It is infantilizing, sentimental, and strips away seriousness, making her from a complete person to something small or cute, almost an object of affection rather than an autonomous individual.

After marriage, her life becomes all around Quimet: her wishes becomes blurred, her language becomes shorter and more restrained, and her decision becomes hesitant, with the first person narratives, we can feel that she is not oppressed externally, but keeps stepping backwards again and again and finally lost the space to place her own self, this is a form of gradual disappearance.

Later on, Quimet starts to raise doves, and with the quantity of the doves increasing, it starts to occupy the room Natalia could stay, and she has to take care for the doves, while the only thing Quimet would do is to enjoy “possession”. I think this stands for the patriarchal will invades the private sphere. And the doves implies her own self, the doves are caged, renamed, deprived of freedom and make noice without meaning, while she is called Colometa, and also confined within marriage, renamed, deprived of autonomy, and her voice is weakened. — Doves symbolize peace, purity and gentleness, but in the text, peace is absent, purity is gradually consumed, and gentleness turns into passivity, with this transformation that turns a symbol of peace into a burden shaped by war, creating a strong sense of irony.

The marriage is terrible enough, but the war makes her life even worse. She is not a wide anymore, but a poor mother and hungry body, her own identity of a social character is reduced to a surviving creature — she has already lost her own voice during the marriage, and now she is not able to think anything other than food, how much “self” does she left?? And this is how it compresses women until they are reduced to nothing but bodies and responsibilities.

In the end, there is no dramatic process of she finding her “self” or “identity”, but just simply regains her footing slowly, and is no longer completely consumed. It is not an awakening, but rather a preservation of a small part of herself after nearly being erased.

Categories
Agostino

Agostino: a boy, a man

Even though I am shocked, I feel bad for Agostino too…

  1. From the beginning, I could tell the story started to go in a weird direction, especially when I read the depiction of how he feels proud of the attention his mother receives and the envy he imagines from others. And he feel disappointed when he saw his mother’s eager of being with other men when his mother accepted the invitation of a boat ride from a young man, thinking his mother does not belong to him in the way he imagined, this unsettled him and triggered him of the past he does not wish to recall.
      • This opening places strong emphasis on the description of the physical body, as well as on how Agostino pays attention to his mother, keeping Agostino’s world small and exclusive to her. This suggests that in Agostino’s boyhood, after his father’s death, his mother is all he has. He looks only at his mother and belongs only to her, and therefore believes that he occupies the same exclusive position in her life as well.
      • In this world he has ideally created, everything feels safe and secure. The emotional roles are clearly defined, and his identity is stable, while the relation is solely exclusive between his mother and him — everyone plays their own roles: his mother belongs to him, and other people are strangers outside their world who pose a threat to him (so he thinks everyone else is jealous of him!) However, he is in a state of conflict, on the one hand, he feels good to see people jealous him, on the other hand, he feels disappointed to be excluded.
      • Thus, he soon understands that he no longer holds a privileged position in his mother’s decision when he realizes his mother’s actively eager to be with other men, this mother-son world started to fall.
  2. He soon turns into adulthood. When he cannot stand this mess, he starts to keep himself away from his mother and tries to get along with a group of aggressive and crude boys, who speak openly and violently about sex. Agostino wishes to be involved with them and wants their sympathy, hoping to become a man by staying with them. But they do not provide any positive response; instead, they mock Agostino’s innocence, humiliate him, and bring him emotional degradation.
    • Among this group of boys, I feel like the sexuality is linked tightly to power, cruelty and dominance, and be used as a topic of conversation to brag about. And it reveals that how the masculinity is performed through humiliation and aggression, and these means become a way to show off a man’s power and masculinity. Agostino’s previous life could never give him such permission to get involved with those boy, so he is neither accepted by the group (as a sign of grown up), nor be able to return back to his childhood world (still be regarded as a boy).
    • I think that in the process of Agostino’s fast growth from a boy to a man, it is not a gain, but a loss. He grows without proper guidance, experiencing only brutal exposure. He loses the perfect image of his mother in his own world and loses the feeling of safety from his boyhood, yet never truly gains the power to become mature. It is not a man growing up from a boy, but a boy forced to accept a cold world without sympathy.

Just as the video lecture mentioned, this book focuses only on a short period of Agostino’s experience, so we are not able to see his day-to-day life. I think he is growing up in a very fast way and can never return to his previous life, but I do not think he has become a man (at least not ready to be a man!).

 

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