I had asked which post my beloved mutuals wanted and this was the chosen one (althought I mix the topics a bit), so let's get to it.
How much Coriolanus hates women. The exotic women issue. First part: Ma Plinth
What Coriolanus appreciates most about Ma Plinth is her cooking. And I may be reading too much into this but considering the last scene in which she appears, Snow's grandmother mistakes Ma for a servant, and in the glorious past his family owned a cook, this detail
left a bad taste in my mouth. Remember the particular reasons why Coriolanus caused the murder of Sejanus, only worsened the feeling.
Because if you took a minute to reflect about it, his compliments to Mrs. Plinth's cooking are not as harmless as they would seem. So let's took a minute to think about it. Some of the defects that we have established Coriolanus possesses are his misogyny and sexism but he got more. To decipher what's disturbing of him complimenting Ma we need to focus on another evil on his list: racism.
This flaw in particular exalts these other already damaging flaws he got, that is Coriolanus' racism made his hate for womans worse.
Sad fact. We can't really blame Coriolanus for got these flaws, he acquired them honestly at home (home implies upbringing, family nucleus: The Snow as the environment and society in which he exists: The Capitol). I will try to be brief because the Snow family is not really the central point of this discussion but it is necessary to understand them, to know why Coriolanus would act in the way he do with with Ma.
We know that the grandmother of Coriolanus and his cousin Tigris was negligent, and somewhat abusive. Sure, she cared about feeding them to a certain extent, but she also messed up their heads in many ways as the adult responsible for their upbringing that she theoretically was. The grandmother is misogynistic, and sexist in turn, never mind that she herself is a woman and suffers from these prejudices (and yes she will suffer from them, explainning this later), she makes sure that her grandchildren understand and replicate these flaws.
Grandma Snow decides early on that 8-year-old Tigris is the one who should do the cooking (a degrading task that only the servants used to do) before she herself tries to do it. She asks her youngest grandson to take care of all the economic problems they face, and goes further, Coriolanus should actually be the president and fix the country broken by the war that the beasts of the districts started.
Coriolanus must be an adult at the same time that he must not lift a finger, the person who must decide themselves to Coriolanus, to herself as an older lady and must kill themselves in taking care of them, is Tigris, the only young woman left in the Snow house. So Coriolanus learns very early what we have already said: behavioral expectations about gender, from his home he has learned that women must serve him, follow his orders, and take care of him, without the needed to him for appreciate the sacrifice and labor.
And a contradiction arises.
Coriolanus needs maternal love, his grandmother cannot give it, and Tigris cannot give it either, not in the way that would be ideal. Excessive passivity, gentleness and totally disinterested indulgent dedication are dangerous traits that threaten survival, Coriolanus is repulsed by them.
Coriolanus' ideal woman, then, is someone who walks in the middle of a perfect balance between utterly dedication and a certain determination. It is an impossible ideal, but it will explain some of the contradictions that arise, because Coriolanus does not respect his grandmother because she is a woman, he is extremely violent with her in his thoughts and shows attitudes that disrepect her, still he respect his grandmother more than he respect his own cousin.
Because Tigris has done the unspeakable, she has lost his dignity, and yet there is one thing that Tigris have that Ma Plinth, and later Lucy Gray Baird, will never have: the status of the Capitol. Both are district, both possess a fatal flaw, not matter they can be perfection.
This how we start finally the talk about Ma Plinth, or better say, Coriolanus' weat dream and nightmare.
The mention of Snow's grandmother was not a coincidence, she, besides embodying violent misogyny, is also the one who promotes a violent and unproven racism. If we consider that the districts (along with Covey) are racial ethnic groups different from the Capitol, this is confirmed at least during the time of TBOSAS with District 2, which explicitly has for example its own traditions of death, different from those existing in the Capitol as the idea of a racial profile that the Plinth family seems to have that distinguishes them from the citizens of the Capitol and easily identifies them as alien to this group.
Covey in particular is the ethnic group that most distinguishes itself from Capitol and the districts by having not only its own traditions, history and closed practices, but a record of genocidal persecution against them.
Coming back, in text Coriolanus' grandmother insinuates that Lucy Gray cannot be innocent, declares her lethal, and dangerous, a menace waiting to attack. Later, she violates Ma Plinth by purposely confusing and mispronouncing her last name, this along with the infamous, your father (Crassus Snow, the son she raised) say that the people of the districts drank blood, is that we can identify her as the cause of Coriolanus having another set of behavioral expectations about another set of certain people who are not necessarily women: the people of the districts. However, these expectations are different, yet similar to those that Coriolanus has for women born in the Capitol.
He expects the people of the districts to be violent, dangerous, vulgar and threatening. An idea that not only his grandmother made sure he internalized, but that the Capitol itself as an institution worked hard to make him conceive as an irrefutable truth.
We know this because although Coriolanus seems to have a much more virulent racism compared to his peers, most of them, like other adults he lives with, are also racist towards the districts. Livia Cardew and Arachne Crane, whom we identify as victims of Coriolanus' misogyny, are at the same time two extremely racist characters within the TBOSAS universe, who in the text attack and dehumanize the people who come from the district, that is to say they attack people that belong to an ethnic racial group different from their own.
Don't despair, it may seem that I'm not going anywhere but I needed us to clarify the racism of Coriolanus - Capitol in order to analyze Ma Plinth, since she is in many aspects the ideal woman. While there are certain parts of her personality that we can identify as coinciding with what Coriolanus considers improper in a woman (such as the expression of her emotions, the excessive gentleness or perceived passivity that are traits that Coriolanus relates to his own dead mother, the femininity and weakness that make him have a great rejection towards them), in reality Ma fulfills the dream behavior that women should have from his perspective, since she not only fulfills a traditional role of being a delicate wife, but she is above all a devoted mother to her son.
Women should feed her ego, serve Coriolanus and never protest. Ma Plinth does this. The lack of maternal love that Coriolanus resents, he expects some form of care and nurturing from the women, something that Ma Plinth also fulfills. So why does he call her pathetic and find her annoying?
One could argue that perhaps those unattractive traits in Ma that I mention above might play a role on why Coriolanus rejects her, but the truth is that Coriolanus proves time and again that he is willing to forgive a woman's so-called shortcomings as long as she meets most of his expectations (this will be vital later for when I talk of Lucy Gray), for example his teacher Saytiria is implied to be an alcoholic, which he does not approve of but can forgive. As long as she is his charming, caring teacher.
This is a grace that Coriolanus in contrast will never granted to Ma Plinth, because she is a district. That is to say, she belongs to a different ethnic group than Coriolanus, not only that, she belongs to a racial ethnic group that Coriolanus considers inferior to his own.
So let us think again what it means that Coriolanus is able only to appreciate Ma Plinth's cooking. Cooking is a labor that in his world (Capitol) is performed by servitude, Ma Plinth in his eyes not only fulfills the expectations of obedience that women as individuals owe him from his perspective, nor is she simply the ideal mother he lost, she is the servant of his dreams. Finally someone from the district who doesn't disrupt the order (like Reaper who pushed him. He may be a man but as a black man of the district he owed servitude to Coriolanus. Let alone Sejanus I have already talked about that topic and how Coriolanus was prejudiced about Sejanus by say he was impulsive, irrational, and owed him obedience). Someone from the district doing what she should do, a manual labor that in the Capitol inferior people and not a respectable lady like her grandmother would do. And maybe Tigris' degradation in his eyes comes from how much his cousin gave up her dignity as a Capitol woman to get closer to the labor of district people (forced sex work, cooking) but it's okay she failed in the kitchen.
Tigris despite having lost her purity could always remain a Snow, unlike Ma Plinth, whose perfection in Coriolanus wet fantasy of femininity is annoying because she remains inhuman, incapable of being on his level and thus her affability will always be unpleasant and inappropriate because of it.
For Ma is inferior, Coriolanus to his regret wishes to please her and gain Ma Plinth's favor, precisely because he lacks a mother of his own, not only that he has the conscience that to keep up appearances he must be nice to her but I think there is a part of Coriolanus that as I said recognizes Ma fits the ideal woman-mother and hence his perception of how much Ma adores him is a bit exaggerated.
On the one hand Ma seems genuinely surprised that her son (who has been excluded and discriminated for over ten years for belonging to a different ethnic group than his classmates at the Academy) has gained a friend and seems to go out of her way to secure that friendship, it is also very likely that she herself has suffered hostile treatment which makes Coriolanus' minimal decency remarkable but I find that actually considering her personality Ma Plinth is quite kind in a normal sense.
It is Coriolanus who perceives her kindness under the light of some extra devotion on her part as the reasons already mentioned (lack of maternal love, being the gentleman with a suitable woman) influence his view at the same time that he cannot appreciate her because she is of a different class. An inferior and primitive class.
That's what makes Coriolanus' blood boil, because Ma Plinth is everything a woman should be but is district. There lies the incredible frustration, Coriolanus lost his respectable, Capitol-born mother, only to discover that Sejanus, who has ursupposed everything someone like Coriolanus should have (i.e. someone of the superior racial ethnicity) including the perfect mother-woman.
Hope the second part focused in Lucy Gray soon.
Pd: There are certain subjects I don't go deep down in this post bc Im planning talk of them later (Snow Family for example) or bc I already talk about them:
1. Coriolanus Mommy Issues
2. More about Coriolanus hate for womans
3. Over Coriolanus and Sejanus you can check this or this one
4. A bit in Toxic Masculinity and Snow
