She had not wanted him to but had let him have his way because ever since she was a child she had generally yielded before anyone with strong willpower, especially if it was a man, not because she was naturally submissive, but because strong male willpower gave her a feeling of safety and trust, together with acceptance and a desire to give in.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a woman's struggle between yielding to strong male willpower and her desire for autonomy.
In this quote, Amos Oz explores the complex dynamics of relationships where one partner, particularly a woman, feels compelled to yield to the strong will of a man. This submission is not a reflection of her inherent nature, but rather a response to social conditioning and the sense of safety it brings her. It speaks to the broader themes of power, trust, and the psychological interactions between gender roles in relationships, highlighting how strong personalities can dominate the dynamics between partners.
In practice
During a discussion about gender roles, this quote can be used to illustrate the complexities of female submission.
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.
Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims.
If we don't stop somewhere, if we don't accept an unhappy compromise, unhappy for both sides, if we don't learn how to unhappily coexist and contain our burned sense of injustice - if we don't learn how to do that, we end up in a doomed state.
Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.
Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.
I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships.
A woman, I always say, should be like a good suspense movie: The more left to the imagination, the more excitement there is. This should be her aim - to create suspense, to let a man discover things about her without her having to tell him.
We don't want to promote any system that treats the fact that an individual is LGBT as a personality disorder. And anything that perpetuates that perception is harmful - not only to that member of the community but the entire community.
Instead of making others right or wrong, or bottling up right and wrong in ourselves, there's a middle way, a very powerful middle way...... Could we have no agenda when we walk into a room with another person, not know what to say, not make that person wrong or right? Could we see, hear, feel other people as they really are? It is powerful to practice this way..... true communication can happen only in that open space.
When you end up happily married, even the failed relationships have worked beautifully to get you there.
You don't learn how to say 'hey, I have a problem,' but you also don't learn how to hear it. There's a total breakdown of how females talk to one another. It's very disconcerting for leadership because it means you don't talk to each other; you talk about each other.
Courtesies cannot be borrowed like snow shovels; you must have some of your own.
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