Autonomy: Emerging Between Inherited and Chosen Values

now listening: The Great Divide (from Secret of the Wings) by McClain Sisters (best movie OST of all time, actually)

    

I’ve made many choices. I chose to banish myself from my sister’s room by bothering her during her finals. I chose to wake up precisely twelve minutes before I left for school so I could maximize my sleep (and make it boldly visible with my bedhead, too). I chose to quit karate lessons at the ripe of age of four because I was the only girl in the class. 

 

Would I say, then, that I have autonomy over my decisions? That is, living up to the Greek roots of “auto” (self) and “nomos” (rule), making decisions according to my own values and reason? 

 

Frankly, I’m not entirely sure. I’ve always viewed autonomy as something earned until now. I supposed once I reached the magical state of being “old enough,” I would have the privilege of doing what I wanted to do without external influence. And to an extent, that stands true: the most obvious standing external influence on me, my parents, has let down over time. It’s only in the absence of their influence that I can pull an all-nighter trying to finish this essay, anyhow. 

 

But even if the choices I make are technically mine, how much are the values that drive them?

 

My pondering has pointed me towards a necessary distinction: the difference between having autonomy and simply feeling autonomous. Luckily, psychologists have termed this situation as one’s perceived autonomy, which stems from the Self-Determination Theory of believing that your behavior is self-endorsed (Aldama et al., 2021). In less complicated terms, it is a subjective feeling in which you believe you have freedom over your actions.

 

Alice Walker’s short story “Roselily” displays this conflict precisely. The story follows Roselily, a Southern black woman, as she prepares to marry a religious man she hardly knows and relocate to Chicago. Walker, in her deliberate use of Roselily’s stream of consciousness and sensory descriptions, illustrates that the motivation for Roselily to give into this marriage is seemingly her perceived sense of control. 

 

That is, by accepting marriage, Roselily is accepting severe restrictions to her self-exploration. She will submit to her husband. She will adhere to a new religion. She will be in an unfamiliar town without roots. But simultaneously, she sees her choice as “Respect, a chance to build. Her children at last from underneath the detrimental wheel.” (Walker, 1967/2007, p. 1). She sustains a sense of hope, almost, that her marriage will provide her with something that aligns with her values of stability and growth for her children. 

 

The usage of the word “chance” is notable. Does her sense of autonomy lie not in her acceptance of the marriage itself, but in what she believes it could possibly provide her: security, dignity, economic stability? 

 

And you may be thinking, well—

 

Well, this interpretation of Roselily seems to box autonomy into the simple conclusion that feeling autonomy does not necessarily make one autonomous, right? Maybe it’s unfair to leave it at that. 

 

Reminiscing my short-lived professional karate career, though I did decide to quit on my own, it may very well have been influenced by external cues shaping my value for personal comfort. I naturally gravitated from male-dominated spaces where I saw that greater authority and competence were modeled almost exclusively by boys and internalized the idea that I couldn’t succeed as a girl. Or maybe I was convinced I was less athletically capable than them.

 

Either way, it pushes me to ask: is it inevitable that our values are shaped by the constraints we live under? If so, does that automatically disqualify our choices from being anything beyond perceived autonomy? 

 

Philosopher Diana T. Meyers (1987) challenges this idea further by defining autonomy as the capacity to reflect upon and endorse one’s values, not merely freedom from influence. So rather than where your values came from, it emphasizes the opportunity to have scrutinized them closely and decided if they still resonate with you. 

Through this lens, Roselily’s choice can be read differently. Roselily never fully endorses the values that her marriage demands from her. Her body itself seems to protest the life she is stepping into as it “itch[es] to be free of satin and voile” (Walker, 1967/2007, p. 2). Her interior monologue aches with clear desire against her husband’s demands for a submissive wife. The values guiding her choices are narrowed to necessity, narrowed to survival over fulfillment. Burdened by economic and social hardship, she isn’t given the opportunity to revise her value of stability via marriage even though she may recognize its existence. 

 

Janie Crawford’s path in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God offers a striking counterpoint. Like Roselily, Janie is a black woman in a world where marriage is both protection and her destiny. Unfortunately, her early choices mirror Roselily’s. 

 

Her first marriage with authoritative, wealthy landowner Logan Killicks is a marriage Janie enters entirely reflecting Nanny’s values. With a history of enslavement, Nanny prioritizes security and stability over happiness and thus, financially-stable marriages. Janie’s second marriage with Joe Starks is a marriage where Janie submits herself to Joe’s controlling, possessive nature in return for social respectability. 

 

Janie appears to actively choose these marriages and how she behaves within them. Technically, she stays with Logan and Joe for a prolonged amount of time. Technically, she complies with their patriarchal behavior, even covering up her hair in public because Joe demanded her to avoid lustful gazes. That is all technically true. 

 

But autonomy, as Meyers would argue, is more whether those decisions reflect values one has critically examined and furthermore, chosen to endorse. Until this point, Janie hasn’t yet done that. She is living inside values she has inherited from Nanny. 

 

It’s only once she is with an understanding partner, Tea Cake, that Janie begins to revise her understanding of what she wants in life, moving beyond Roselily’s stagnation. Through reflection of three marriages, Janie realizes her own evolving values: she craves mutual commitment and maintaining her sense of self. By the end of the novel, she even “pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net” as she embraces these newfound values as her own (Hurston, 2006, p. 193).

 

Contrastingly, Roselily and Janie illustrate the pivotal point that autonomy cannot equate to freedom. One can feel autonomous while remaining deeply constrained by society, and one can lack autonomy like Janie even while technically choosing. Then how and to what extent can autonomy operate in the existence of social and gendered constraints? 

 

Another point that emerges from these stories is that along with reflection of values, it is equally crucial for our actions to align with these held values. 

 

I have a weakness for anything remotely nostalgic, and a good 2010s movie isn’t safe. Every few months I’ll cozy up and rewatch my favorite movie, Secret of the Wings. And every time, I find myself looking at it from a different angle. 

 

This film is set in a fairy world divided into Pixie Hollow (for warm fairies) and the Winter Woods (for winter fairies). There is only one point of connection between these worlds: The Border. As Lord Milori claims, this border has historically existed to protect both communities. Crossing it risks physical harm: warm fairies’ wings crack in the frigid winter, and winter fairies are fatigued by the heat. 

 

 

Consequently, Tinker Bell (warm fairy) initially obeys this rule as she believes obedience instantiates safety, a value she inherited due to the border’s existence. This is akin to Janie, who marries Logan as she inherits Nanny’s belief that marriage instantiates safety. 

 

However, Tinker Bell’s alignment shifts when she discovers she has a separated-at-birth twin, Periwinkle, who is a winter fairy. Though Tinker Bell first met her by accidentally crossing the border, she continues crossing the border to reunite with Periwinkle, even “tinkering” up her own winter gear from leaves and fabrics from Pixie Hollow to keep warm. 

 

 

 

In a sense, she is rejecting societal rules. Yet I’d say her true autonomy emerges not from that rejection, but from recognizing which behaviors express her evolving values. 

 

Psychologists Vladimir Ponizovskiy et al. (2019) offer this as the concept of “value-instantiating beliefs” (para 2). Through experiment, Ponizovskiy et al. presented participants with specific behaviors (e.g. choosing an electric car) and manipulated whether the action was described as helping or hindering a core value (e.g. environmentalism). They found that a person’s values only predicted their behavior if they believed the action accurately expressed that value. In other words, we must see a connection between what we value and what actions we actually do to enforce those values. Without that link, values remain abstract ideals.

 

Perhaps this is why Tinker Bell persists in her choice to cross the border, because doing so allows her to further unearth her identity, her long-lost twin. Perhaps this is why Janie leaves all three marriages to return home alone, because doing so allows her to embrace her new value of self-sufficiency. 

 

Perhaps this is also why, as I grew up, I began to inhabit spaces that genuinely piqued my interest, regardless of their associated gender expectations. I’ve jabbed at art, classical piano, difficult science classes (ahem, Physics C). At one point, I even had a strange fixation on pursuing boxing thanks to my undefeated reign in Wii Sports Boxing. 

 

Reflecting on my four-year-old value of self-comfort, I realize it was instantiated by behaviors that limited my scope to discover myself and my true passions—precisely why I shied away from karate.  Aware of this value, I now value personal growth and engagement over such comfort by exploring my eclectic passions. 

 

These behaviors instantiate a value now with more importance to Tinker Bell, Janie, and even me: self-discovery. 

 

If autonomy required a life untouched by social forces, then it would belong to no one. Gender, history, and social standing are all forces that cannot simply be set aside so we can freely pursue desires. But as evidenced by all three works, autonomy may just take on an alternative form. 

 

More fittingly, It may be the ability to negotiate values and behaviors within circumstances that are never entirely chosen by us, of determining for ourselves what best forges our journey to define ourselves. 

 

There may be no moment where we can definitively say autonomy is fully achieved, no moment where we can draw a clear line between free decisions from constrained. Even now, some choices I make (such as choosing to suffer through Physics C) seem to fall between a mix of my genuine curiosity and external pressures to do so. However, there exists a continual effort to live sincerely to ourselves within the values we hold, even if the world has played a role in sculpting them. 

 

And at times, it seems that very effort is the most autonomous act we can make.