Exhibit Presentation-- "Many masks, many selves"

For me, Doniger's idea that we all have thousands of necessary masks, none of which is a true "self," is best visualized by picturing the image of a shoe closet. Imagine all of your shoes on a large (or perhaps not so large) shelf. Each pair of those shoes are ours and we own each of those pairs of shoes for a reason -- no matter how trivial. Like with Doniger's masks, each pair of shoes defines a certain side of us, but could never possibly on its own sum up who we truly are. Like we would never wear athletic shoes to an interview or dress shoes to a game of pick-up basketball, each mask serves its necessary and unique purpose in a certain situation. However, if you were to have to choose a single pair of shoes to live the rest of your life in, you would not be able to. Would you take the pair of shoes that look the best? Are the most practical? Are the most comfortable? While we each have that favorite pair of shoes, we all face times when that pair of shoes just can't do the job and another pair is needed. Doniger writes, "We are imprisoned in our self, but it is a very big prison. When we put on a mask we have a choice, ... , and in a sense they are all our own" (68). Like with masks, society forces us to wear shoes when we go outside (and in some cases even inside our own homes). However, when it comes to choosing which pair of shoes to put on in the morning, we still have many choices and which pair of shoes we ultimately choose to wear on a given day is still up to us and says something about who we are.