Every society has their own definition of the “ideal wife”.
Many factors, with some discrepancies relative from culture to culture, include
child rearing, cooking, cleaning, and sexual availability. But the most
important quality a woman must have in order to be considered idealistic is
compliance to her husband. For the women in the South Arcot district of
Tamilnadu in South India, they have no choice but to give up their free will
and obey the demands of their male oppressors. In the case study “Expel the
Lover, Recover the Wife: Symbolic Analysis of a South Indian Exorcism” by
Isabelle Nabokov, she explains the rituals of demonic possession and exorcism
in this society. Such rituals are usually seen as taboo or rare occurrences,
but in the Tamil culture, they are used by the
men as a way to further control the female population and keep gender
roles intact.
