My Self Portrait 1

This is another list 😄. Characters in novels, fairy tales and films that have really stayed with me. These characters are strong, even if some of them are abused and they go through exploitation and oppression but they rise up at the end. Well, life is about making choices!

Eeyore from Winnie The Pooh books

And here they are................

1. The donkey Eeyore in the Winnie-the-Pooh children books by A. A. Milne. He is generally characterized as a pessimistic, gloomy, depressed, anhedonic, old grey donkey who is a friend of the title character, Winnie-the-Pooh. The fact that it is always slow, gloomy and depressed strikes a chord with me, especially during my tumultuous young adult life and later on when I was struggling with severe depression. I have always considered conquering the depression as the greatest achievement in my life. (Anhedonia: Loss of the capacity to experience pleasure. The inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences. Anhedonia is a core clinical feature of depression, schizophrenia, and some other mental illnesses.)
2. The character Andrew Beckett played by Tom Hanks in the 1993 movie Philadelphia. Hanks played a senior lawyer in a large law firm in Philadelphia. In the movie Beckett is gay and is strickened with AIDS. He however has a very loving and supportive family. Hank won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the film. Is a sad and touching movie loosely based on real events. 
3. Karen Blixen played by Meryl Streep in the 1985 movie Out of Africa. The depiction of a strong woman.
4. The character Francesca Johnson played by Meryl Streep in the 1995 movie The Bridges of Madison County. Here Streep plays the part of a housewife who has a short affair with a National Geographic photographer. She almost leave her husband but in the end decided against it at the last minute.  
5. Gadis Pantai (The Girl From The Coast) in the novel with the same name by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. In the novel this girl is never named and is always referred to as Gadis Pantai. The central character of The Girl from the Coast was based on Pramoedya’s grandmother. This girl, lives with her parents in a fishing village on the coast of Java. When she is fourteen, word of her beauty reaches the local bendoro, a Javanese aristocrat in the service of the Dutch colonial overlords. The nobleman sends word to her family that she is to become his wife. Filled with hope for their daughter’s future, her mother and father agree to have her married in a ceremony in which the groom is absent and is represented by a dagger. The parents accompany their child to the great man’s house in the city. There, they find a disturbing omen of their daughter’s future. A servant is caring for a baby, the child of a previous wife who had been divorced and dismissed at the bendoro’s whim. Even reading this book at a young age, I find the bendoro's attitude towards women totally disgusting. 
6. Jean Louise Finch or Scout Finch. The narrator and protagonist of the book To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Scout is about six at the beginning of the novel. She is a tomboy and is a very intelligent child. She is advanced in her reading capacity even before she goes to school. She lives in Maycomb with her father Atticus, her brother Jem and their black housekeeper Calpurnia.
7. The servant girl Lin in the 1964 Malay movie Rumah Itu Dunia Aku based on the novel of the same name by Hamzah Hussin. The character was played by the beautiful and gentle actress Latifah Omar. It's about a young girl who is a servant in a wealthy household. 
8. The character Poniem in the novel Merantau Ke Deli by Hamka. Poniem is a beautiful and hard-working woman of Javanese descent who falls in love and marries Leman who is of Minang descent. This is a story about the social issue of marriage between different ethnic groups, each with very strong ties to "adat" or custom. Poniem is oppressed by Leman when he takes a second wife of his own ethnic group. Later on he divorced her. I wrote a post in BM about this novel dated 23 Nov. 2016.

To be continued.................