A Preliminary Project Proposal by Pranjali Bandhu
The study seeks to question the viability of the concept of feminist aesthetics in relation to contemporary women writing in Indian languages. This is meant to provide the Introduction to an anthology in English translation of contemporary (post-1990) short stories by women writers in different languages of India. Each language section (represented by 2-3 short stories) would be prefaced by a Note giving the history, background and trends in women writing in that particular regional language, short biographical notes on the writers represented, and a fairly comprehensive bibliography of women writing in that language. A monolithic theoretical approach is not necessary or desirable in these separate introductions. Each contributor is free to evolve his/her own approach to the questions at hand.
The study seeks to examine whether women writing can be considered a genre in itself. Is the concept of feminist aesthetics enjoying currency among many Western literary critics and followed by some Indian literary critics as well, theoretically viable? Our study would like to disprove the tenability of such a proposition. We would do this by on the one hand going into the history of the evolution of feminist aesthetics in the West, its links with the feminist women’s movement, its material base, intentions, biases and weaknesses. We shall try to disprove the tenability of this concept by showing its inadequacy as an all encompassing framework to deal with women writing from different classes, ages and countries; and by concrete analysis of contemporary women writing in different Indian languages. Women writing can be understood and evaluated more adequately on the basis of criteria which go beyond the narrow framework provided by feminist aesthetics. We shall try to evolve these criteria, i.e., an alternative aesthetic framework, on the basis of our analysis and in the background of Indian aesthetic theories.
Our method of analysis will be comparative, critical, historical and socio-economic. We intend to disprove the viability of feminist aesthetics through relating women writing to the time and place of its origin, the existing socio-political setting, the current aesthetic theories and literary trends, and their place in and response to this milieu.
Western Feminist Literary Theory
Virginia Woolf, a conscious feminist writer, has been acknowledged as the pioneer figure in the West, who set about systematically trying to establish feminist literary criticism as a discipline. That there were some contradictions and dualism in her approach is also not subject to dispute. Virginia’s starting point was the query as to why, on the whole, women had failed to create great works of art. Her query, however, was a very pertinent and political one in terms of the women’s movement in her place and time, because it put into question the position of women in Victorian England.
Women had been denied an opportunity to develp their faculties, they had been kept out of academies and institutions, from leadership in the state. Denied experience, travel and intercourse by a hostile society, women writers were thwarted from blossoming into great writers. However, contradictoriness and dualism are to be found in her proffered solutions. Her contradictoriness is that of a white, middle class elitist woman, who, though she is intense in her opposition to patriarchy, is unable or unwilling to perceive and try to resolve her own racial, imperial and class biases.
Her solutions wander off into two different directions, both reformist. Postulating a fundamental dichotomy between male and female perceptions [one based on reason (objectivity) and the other on intuition and imagination (subjectivity)] she demanded that women writers stop making concessions to male modes of perception, as Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontè sisters had occasionally done, in spite of their genius, and devote themselves to the exploration of the truly feminine modes of perception and expression. The obvious limitation in this viewpoint, which diverges quite startlingly from her initial criticism of women’s position in her society, is that it does not help in liberating women from their limited and circumscribed life-style and a correspondingly circumscribed range of themes, which were evidently in need of expansion to wider horizons than hitherto often available or possible. What is initially for her the cause and symptom of the inferiority of women, which has to be overcome, becomes the basis of women’s superiority, the crystallisation of feminism as a superior worldview in opposition to patriarchy. For example, their very exclusion from male domains endows them a moral superiority and a civilising mission. They are by nature pacifists and can engage in passive resistance against all war preparations, by refusing to bear children as cannon fodder for instance.
The other solution offered by her is androgyny, i.e., a fusion or combination of male and female modes to perception to attain the truly artistic vision, which she asserted that all great writers had attained. We find in her work and criticism a shifting from one point of view to the other, from the feminine/feminist to the androgynous. One of the major problems with the androgynous viewpoint is that it confines masculine/feminine to the domain of perception only and does not relate them to socially constructed gender identities which need to be socially negated and reconstructed.
The resurgence of the women’s movement in the West in the 1970s was responsible for renewed interest in women writing. Feminist literary criticism as an academic discipline is linked up with the emergence of Women’s Studies programmes set up in various universities, particularly in the US. English and American feminists felt that by and large women writers had been ignored or marginalised in literary history. They sought to rediscover and reclaim the work of many women writers from oblivion. Though this work is necessary certain biases are evident in these rewritings of literary history. The works of past women writers are interpreted and excerpted from the point of view of modern feminism. Certain aspects of these texts are misread, distorted or ignored to fit them into modern feminist ideology, which postulates a sharp and fundamental dichotomy between the sexes. From this, feminist aesthetics derives its notion of women having a fundamentally different perception of the world, which is supposed to lead to differing modes and content of literary communication. The special characteristics of this are: concentration on the sphere of interpersonal relations, the analysis of emotions and their nuances, emphasis on subjectivity and its expression, giving voice to the self that has been unrecognised and suppressed. Intellectual debates, particularly in France, have centred on the problems with and possibilities of a woman’s language. Helèné Cixous, for example, has suggested that all women writers of force give birth to words flowing in accord with the contractual rhythms of labour.
However, as we shall show through Elaine Showalter’s elucidation of the development of feminist literary criticism, the inherent dilemmas and limitations of feminist aesthetics, as already exemplified by Woolf, have not been overcome.
The Female Aesthetic, which celebrated female culture and consciousness separated out from a ‘universal’ or ‘neuter’ aesthetic realm has to acknowledge its biologistic base. This dilemma of having to accept an essential female nature based on biology was sought to be overcome by some critics through gynocritics, which focussed on women writing (“multiple signifying systems of female literary traditions”) as a subject of analysis from a wide variety of approaches and methods. Gender theory is the latest in feminist criticism which analyses the social, cultural and psychological constructs imposed upon biological sexual difference. None of these approaches go beyond a reformist programme.
Black Feminist Criticism
Black feminist criticism provides some germ cells in the critique of Euro-American ‘white’ feminist literary criticism.
Black women in the US had participated both in the women’s movement and the Civil Rights and Black power movements of the 1960s. However, they felt their voices and interests inadequately represented in both. The Black movement (historically, but particularly the Black Power movement of the 1960s) was primarily concerned with the liberation of blacks as a class, and did not promote women’s liberation as a priority. Indeed, the movement was for the most part spearheaded by males. The feminist movement, on the other hand, was concerned with the oppression of women as a class, but it was dominated by white, middle class women and almost always confined itself to, or defined and concentrated upon issues as to benefit them only, and was thus seen to be irrelevant as far as the majority of black women were concerned.
The black feminist approach, according to one of its earliest and leading exponents, Barbara Smith, embodies the realisation that the politics of sex as well as race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of black women writers; that black women writers constitute an identifiable tradition that has to be worked out.
The positive achievement of black feminist criticism and scholarship has been a research into black history and the bringing to the forefront the role and contributions of black women intellectuals, political activists and writers, like Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston and others who had often been dismissed, misunderstood or neglected due to male bias in literary history and criticism. Black women literary and intellectual production, along with political activity, has been very much present right from the beginnings of an Afro-American oral and written literature and history. Their literary output has experienced quite an impetus since the 1960s and seems to be continuing. As black women have struggled to define and liberate themselves, they have made and are making substantial contributions to black literature. According to black poet, Mari Evans: “Black women have brought into the literature a special knowledge of their lives and experiences that is as different from the descriptions/portrayals of women by men, as the vision of Black writers in the 50s and 60s differed from that of whites writing on black subjects ... They braved the ideological strictures of the 60s and freed themselves from the roles assigned to them in the writings of their male counterparts, where, depicted as queens and princesses, or as earth mothers, and idealised Big Mountains of superhuman wisdom and strength, they were unrecognisable as individuals.” [M. Evans (ed.): Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, New York: Doubleday, p. xxiv].
However, black feminist criticism has failed in delineating a coherent, continuous and separate tradition of black women writing within black literature. It has not sufficiently taken note of or analysed differences among black women writers, historically or even within the same historical period. There is a difference in outlook and approach, for example, in the work of Ann Petry and Zora Nele Hurston, between Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, between Mari Evans and Michele Wallace, differences in their world views reflected in their writings and style, which cannot be accounted for within the terms of feminist criticism.
The uniformity of black women’s oppression and their response to it, contemporaneously and historically, cannot be taken as given because black women too are divided by class and outlook. Among black women writers we have what can be termed as bourgeois feminist writings (Alice Walker), social realist works (Ann Petry), magic realist styles (Toni Morrison), and so on. Apart from this, there have to be criteria which help in distinguishing ‘good’ art from ‘bad’ or ‘mediocre’, or useful art from diversionary or cathartic art. The appropriation of feminist theory and criticism by black women academics, even if it si expanded into the category of womanist, does not help in this.
Critique of Feminism and Feminist Literary Criticism
To overcome these deficiencies or limitations in feminist literary criticism we have to be clear about the limitations of feminism as a political agenda which demands equality of women with men within the framework of bourgeois democracy, and some women writers may adopt this position and others may not. The progressive intent in this is not subject to doubt. However, because it fails to incorporate the crucial elements of empire, race and class, like bourgeois democracy, it remains Eurocentric and elitist in essence. It fails to acknowledge that political democracy in the West is based on the subjection and exploitation of the majority of nations in the world. White middle class women seeking liberation as human beings from oppressive roles would have to take recourse to a more holistic ideology than that offered by feminism.
When black women, or third world women take over the theory of feminism, though they may try to shape it to fit their needs and reconstruct it in terms of black feminism and third world feminism, they cannot rid it of its reformist edge. They cannot do away with the fact that it does not offer a holistic theory of liberation, for men, women and children, but remains separatist, anti-male in orientation, and in essence argues for female/feminine superiority as a retort to male domination. The weakness of feminist theory which does not necessarily entail and envisage overthrow of all iniquitous and exploitative relations in society, including those of exploitation of men and women by women, makes feminism only just another ingredient, at the most a reformist one, in the existing mix of pluralist democracy in the West, rather than constituting a radical critique of that pluralized melange in itself. If Third World and African-American women rush to adopt feminism as their political strategy for equality and liberation, though they may criticize the hegemony of white middle class women in the movement and their Eurocentric and racist biases, by their very approach they cannot avoid becoming just some other strands in the pluralist mix of feminism, where white middle class feminism dominates and is willing to just about patronisingly recognise and accept the existence of other strands at the margins.
Carried over into the realm of literary criticism and theory the feminist approach remains a narrow and partial one. Women’s writings cannot be pressed into a women’s only literary tradition with a continuity and unity of its own. We cannot take women’s writings or even women centred writings to be a synonym for ‘feminist’ writing. Feminist writing can be considered as only one of the trends within women writing, and that too only a recent one. Women, occupying different, hierarchically arranged and changing positions in different societies and periods, do not share in a universal way a commonly felt, supportive culture, a cluster of beliefs and responses. They are influenced in their literary and artistic production by contemporaneous social and political movements, ideologies, literary trends and conventions, which are carried and often led by their male counterparts also. Their specific contributions, therefore, have to be seen within this broader historical and socio-political context, if these are to be grasped in a fuller way, and cultural specificities and nuances are to be taken note of. It is the intention of this study to establish the validity of such an approach on the basis of analysis of contemporary women writing in Indian languages.
Feminist aesthetics does not allow us to analyse contemporary or past women writing from the point of view of how they are confronting existing social and political issues, which necessarily also have specifically feminine components. In this connection, we can enquire whether the woman writer in question is subsuming the specific women’s issues to general inequity and suffering, or whether only specific problems of women in relation to male oppression are emphasized. Is she able to show up the relationships and interconnections between the specific conditions of women and the overall exploitative order? Does she maintain that fiction which incorporates social and economic problems directly and in terms of their effects on human beings, exposing everything that stultifies growth, development, knowledge, all violations of human potentiality of men, women, children and LGBTQ (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people, not obscuring the fact that poor men who help victimise poor (and women belonging to other classes) are victims too? Can we find in her work the record of the ‘waste’ of men, women and children, their crippling, the tragedy of what might have been?
When we look at women and literature with specific reference to women writing in our sub-continental languages, we would like to tentatively pose the following questions to be able to eventually arrive at a literary critical framework, alternative to the feminist one.
Antecedents or history of women’s literary and artistic production – oral traditions, Bhakti literature, forms, songs, poetry.
Beginnings of ‘modern’ literary traditions with the emergence of new forms like short stories and novels; the relationship of these with colonisation and the influence of western colonial literary forms; the relationship to older forms; what kind of evolution has taken place? Content-wise, how are they reflecting and inducing changes in women’s status in society? How this is related to the overall economic and political changes taking place in society in the process of colonisation; men’s responses in literature; women’s responses, contributions; the differences and commonalities between the two.
Neo-colonial Phase (Post-1947 period): To what extent we find portrayed in women’s writings the hunger, slavery and bondage engendered by neo-colonial exploitation and domination. Examination of literary trends: to what extent influenced by those in the West? Are they being able to give any analysis of social reality here, to what extent is there a taking over and transformation of indigenous literary forms and traditions? A look at the new women’s movement since the 1970s and the literature associated with it.
(Written in 1994, after Susie Tharu’s and K. Latlitha’s edited volume of Women’s Writing in India came out in the early 1990s).