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Is Carmela Soprano a
Feminist?
Philosophy project.
Chavely R.
Carmela’s Care Ethic’s
Carmela Soprano is the antifeminist. She is the salon-pampered
homemaker who presides over the furniture suites and window
treatment of the Soprano mini-mansion.
Carmela has chosen a traditional marriage that has rendered her
financially and emotionally dependent on a violent and duplicitous
husband.
Even though Carmela is not a feminist i think she uses a kind of
moral reasoning, called “care ethics”.
Care Ethics is the philosophical elaboration in the 1970s and the
1980s by Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, whose work
discussess how people solve their moral problems.
Justice and Care in Moral
Reasoning.
For most men, being moral means objectively settling disputes between
individuals when their rights are in conflict. This conception of morality,
sometimes called the “ JUSTICE TRADITION”.
People who use “justice” in their moral reasoning apply abstract moral rules
and arguments to settle moral conflicts impartially and universally.
Moral conflicts in women hesitate to solve those conflicts by “universalizing
maxims” or “inalienable human rights”. People who use care in their moral
reasoning approach morality as particular and contextual.
Feminist philosophers who have adapted Gilligan’s psychological research
into a full-fledged moral philosophy include Virginia Held, Nel Noddings,
Sara Ruddick, and Joan Tronto.
Justice and care describe different modes or styles of practical moral
reasoning and Carmela’s moral reasoning styles is care-ethical.
Carmela on Marriage and Morality.
Carmela uses care ethical reasoning in her moral deliberations,
even though she is no feminist role model. Specifically, Carmela’s
evolving attitude towards her marriage illustrates how care ethics
works.
Carmela’s moral reasoning here mixes justice reasoning with
incipient care ethics.
Carmela understands caring for others as maintaining the marriage
even at the cost of one’s own happiness.
Her care ethics will soon evolve beyond self-sacrifice.
Carmela versus Dr. Krakower,Care
versus Justice.
Dr. Krakower demonstrates how Carmela, at that time, had not yet
become a mature care thinker who is able to balance her
responsibilities to care for others with caring for herself.
Dr. Krakower refers to Dostoyevsky’s crime and punishment,
musing that Tony could use the time in jail to reflect and repent on
his crimes.
She moves from resenting Tony’s infidelity, to defending him, finally
resolving the dilemma by emotional extortion.
The feminine voice speak with endless qualifications and
compromises, while the masculine voice is unwavering and rigid.
Carmela needs for Tony to stop hurting her. But she is oddly
indifferent to he brutal nature of Tony’s Mafia business. Dr.
Krakower thinking draws heavily on the justice tradition.
Using care ethical reasoning does not automatically lead to good
solutions to moral problems. This is no the mature vision of care
ethics that Gilligan describes.
Carmela’s Mature Care Ethics.
She finally summons the courage to balance her responsibilities to
others with self-assertion.
Since those to whom she has devoted herself make fewer demands
on her time. Carmela is ready to turn attention towards herself
Carmela acknowledges the pain a marital separation will cause the
children, but also accepts hat this pain can no longer be postponed
by shouldering all of the hurt herself.
Carmela has actually succeeded in using mature care ethics to
reason through her moral dilemma. She is finally able to balance
her responsalities to her family without sacrificing her own needs.
“What’s done is done. We are where we are , it’s for the best”
Carmela and Feminism: Perfect
Together?
Carmela would defy the stereotype of a yielding, self-sacrificing,
deferential woman that care ethics might at first glance be said to
valorize.
Feminists who worry that care ethics merely reinforces harmful
stereotypes of women could be assuaged by Carmela’s
simultaneous defiance of these stereotypes and employment of
care reasoning.
Carmela uses care ethics despite the facts that she is not any more
a feminist than the 5 families are a harmless civics organization.
While using care ethics in moral reasoning is not the same as being
a feminist, perhaps for Carmela the former could lead to the latter.
“Attenda e veda” – wait and see.