T
he Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake tells a story of a girl called Rose who had the
ability to taste emotions that make her feel depressed and isolated. During the time
when Rose was growing up from childhood to adolescent, she constantly dealt with the
relationships with her family members, her brother Joseph who is a weird genius in
science, her mom Lane who is a woman struggles to maintain domestic relationship, her
father Paul from whom ignorance represents his personality. Each of the character in the
book are typical cases for understanding how gender typing imprints people to socialize
and cope with different emotions. Rose’s special abilities to perceive the overwhelming
emotions from people in her family creates the emotionally and internally descriptive
based atmosphere for the book, from which readers could analyze how the prevailing
problem in the status quo—gender socialization—influence people to cope with emo-
tions in the society. In the book, the author, through purposefully distinguishing the
psychological descriptions of each character, depicts how men and women deal with
their emotion differently and why they present this kind of difference.
Gender socialization is a term that aims to explain gender identity and tradition-
al values toward gender in the society. However, the gender socialization is separated
into two categories, man and woman. Social expectations and the gender roles set the
space for people to stereotype male and female, thus differentiate how different genders
are taught to communicate and deal with conflicts or problems. Being as a world’s
collective knowledge of culture, myth, traditions, and ideas, stereotypes are deep in
human minds. The stereotypes in the first childhood stage may be trivial. However, the
impact might be significant because in most of the culture, “girls are taught since the
very early age that they have to obey, and boys – that they have to be strong and to be
leaders.”(Marinova, 2) From then on, boys are told to be strong and to hide their weak-
ness. Girls, on the opposite, are instructed to focus on domestic caring that associate
with the “women duties” that everything related to trivial emotions. The sense of having
more attention on caring makes female to be more sensitive to others. Thus, this kind of
gender education from the early age is the reason why male and female socialize differ-
ently whenever they meet problems.
Rose Edelstein was a normal and innocent girl before her ninth birthday, when
she ate a cake baked by her mom, it all began. Being able to taste the bit of sadness in
the birthday cake, Rose was shocked and tortured from tasting the emotions in food.
She tried to express herself and seek for help from others. However, her mother denied