Trios of Women: Western Mythology and Rushdie’s “Shame”
By: Kayla Ludington, Jason Finner, and Kaitlyn Donahue
Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame is a novel probably set in Pakistan (or a fictional country resembling Pakistan), with a character named Sufiya who comes to embody the unperceived shame of her family members. Sufiya begins to blush constantly,go into fits of rage and, oh yeah, at one point she rips the heads off of roughly 218 turkeys (give or take a few) and eventually runs off to pillage rural towns. On a slightly less exciting note, the main character and future husband of the turkey-slaying Sufiya is a boy named Omar, who is raised by his three mothers in a sequestered mansion that is falling apart. The mothers have not seen the light of day outside of their home in several years. They could easily be considered non-traditional characters, but trios of mysterious women are nothing new in Western literature.
Perhaps the most noticeable influence in Salman Rushdie’s Shame is from Greek mythology, that is, the three Fates, who are connected to the three mothers of Omar Shakil. Now, anyone who has seen Disney’s Hercules knows who the three Fates are. You know the part when those old ladies spool out Hercules’ thread while he’s still mortal, but they can’t cut it to kill him because he turned into a God? Yeah! Those ladies are the Fates I’m talking about! Clotho (the spinner), Lachesis (the apportioner of lots), and Atropos (she who cannot be turned) work together to spin the thread of life, measure how long it will be, and then decide when to cut it, ending some poor mortal’s life.
Omar’s three mothers are similar to these three fates in one major way. Like Clotho, the mothers start Omar’s life with the strange conception and birth through all three of them. They then morph into Lachesis when they raise Omar and keep him locked away in their mansion, trying to control his life (fate) by never letting him out. (Though in this part they fail to control Omar’s life because he does go out into the world.) At the end of the story these women turn into Atropos. They decide the fates of Raza, Bilquis, and Omar by letting Omar be killed by his own wife, Sufiya, and in the case of Raza and Bilquis by actually murdering them (cutting their life thread, you see?).
Another movie that portrays the three fates or Graeae is Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. The Graeae are very similar to the Fates in that they are three old women who share one eye and one tooth between each other. It is when they look through their eye that they can see a person’s fate.The three old women in the taxi cab tell Percy and his friends a riddle in order to find his true path. The three mothers in Shame, Chunni, Munnee, and Bunny, resemble the Graeae due to how they become “one” in the beginning of the novel. When Omar is born, the three mothers all presented signs of being pregnant which included being able to breastfeed after he was born. They shared these symptoms just like how the Graeae shared one eye and one tooth.
The idea of the fates can also be seen as a twisted version of the three witches from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. The witches lead Macbeth to his later demise within the play by using their abilities to predict his destiny. The mysterious habits and relatively unknown identities of the witches is similar to that of the mothers in Shame. It is even unclear which mother gave birth to Omar, though all three seem to view each other as equal co-mothers in his upbringing.
Another connection to myths and folk stories appears with the novel’s use of the Beauty and the Beast, a well known story. Today’s readers might know this story best through the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast that has been made and remade several times, where a hideous beast falls in love with a beautiful woman. Beauty and the Beast might be seen as one person: the Beast is actually a beautiful man cursed. One can also see this theme within the novel Shame with the character Sufiya. She was born a beautiful little girl, but eventually a beast began to emerge from within. She was weighed down with so much shame that a dark hideous beast took over making her kill several people (and turkeys).
It’s interesting that a Western influence like this would factor into a novel set in the Middle East, but given that it was written by Salman Rushdie, perhaps it isn’t that surprising after all. His use of the Three Mysterious Women trope definitely adds to the litany of odd characters in Shame, but his adaptation of the Beast into the turkey-killer Sufiya is perhaps his best use of Western influence in the novel. I mean, 218 turkeys in one spree!? Come on.
The blend of Middle Eastern and Western cultural influences, as well as Rushdie’s own crazy imagination, makes for a really great (and mildly disturbing) novel.
