Archive for June 2011
Marilyn French: The Women’s Room
When I was at university, a supervisor picked me up on one of my essay writing habits. ‘Why do you always call the reader “he”?’ he asked. I replied that it was shorthand, that I couldn’t be bothered with adding the cumbersome ‘or she’ every third sentence, that the Elizabethans used to use ‘he’ as a neuter form (I was a cocky so-and-so) and that, as a woman, I was aware I could get away with it.
He looked at me kindly but sternly. ‘I think you need to think more carefully about the battles that have been fought about this issue,’ he said.
Marilyn French wouldn’t have needed such a reminder. Writing in the seventies, a few years after the crest of the second wave of feminism broke on western shores, she made the struggles of women for equal recognition and a voice in debate the lifeblood of her work.
Told from the perspective of Mira, a bright but deeply conventional woman who gradually learns to test and then finally reject the status quo she has been brought up with in small-town America, The Women’s Room blows apart accepted structures and forces readers to question whether what is is what has to be. It brings in the lives of numerous female characters, each of whom eventually runs up and smashes against the limitations of the world in which she is obliged to exist.
The book is so massive in scope (despite its domestic subject matter) that it’s tempting to think of it as a sort of female Odyssey, in which the heroine encounters a string of challenges in an effort to reach harmony and a true home. French would no doubt reject such a definition, however, as her narrative is nothing if not a struggle to find a way of articulating the mental fetters that bind women by breaking free of traditional masculine structures, Homeric epics and all.
Val, French’s most memorable and tragic character, puts it most succinctly:
‘We’re rebels against all establishments because we’re rebels against male supremacy, male surface bonding, male power, male structures. We want a completely different world, one so different that it’s hard to articulate, impossible to conceive of a structure for it’
And that’s the dilemma that makes the book so compelling: when all that’s biased and tainted is stripped away, precious little remains on which to build a new vision. Val has a stab at it, positing a sort of Utopian community not dissimilar to the Italian commune Germaine Greer sketches out in The Female Eunuch, but even she has to admit the vision is unconvincingly vague.
Witnessing the sad dissolution of the women’s lives, you can’t help but feel how difficult it is to envisage true equality in a system that is fundamentally constructed by and for men. We are all (men and women alike) so trapped in the world-view we’ve been fed and clothed in since we were born that imagining that there might be an alternative is challenge enough for most of us, let alone trying to thrash out what that alternative might look like.
Society, the book leaves you feeling, would be entirely different if it had been constructed by women — not necessarily better, but very different. In such a world, instead of swallowing my arrogance and adding ‘or she’ into my assignments, I might not have been writing essays at all.
Picture by Galdo Trouchsky. With thanks to Georgina for recommending The Women’s Room.
Kiran Desai: The Inheritance of Loss
VS Naipaul’s recent assertion that no women authors are equal to him unleashed an avalanche of comments from readers and writers around the world. Among the arguments advanced in the Nobel Prize-winner’s defence was the suggestion that women wordsmiths tend to focus on narrow, domestic topics and leave the empire building to the boys. Women, bless ’em, the implication was, can’t get their pretty little heads round politics and have no need to try when there are big, strong writers like Naipaul around to do the thinking for them.
If evidence were needed against such a ridiculous argument, then Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss surely provides plenty. Set in the 1980s, in the remote community of Kalimpong in the foothills of the Himalayas, the book follows the fortunes of three characters who spend their days alone together in a crumbling villa in the jungle, each locked in his or her own neuroses, obsessions, memories and fears.
While the curmudgeonly judge broods over his chessboard, plagued with recollections of the wife he once cruelly drove away, his orphaned granddaughter beguiles the long hours with dreams of her earnest, impoverished tutor from the slum down the hill. Meanwhile, their cook pines for letters from his emigrated son, who, unbeknownst to him, is tasting the bitter side of the immigrant experience in NYC.
So wrapped up is each of them in his or her own concerns, that they are oblivious to the currents of anger and bitter hatred swirling about the region until the crusade for a separate state of ‘Gorkhaland’ literally invades their home. Yet, as the insurgency gathers pace and atrocity is heaped upon atrocity, they each struggle to break out of their isolation and forge the bonds of affection and understanding that will ultimately save them and, perhaps, their homeland.
Having been lucky enough to spend a few days in Kalimpong recently, I can vouch for the fidelity of Desai’s evocation of what is a fragile, enchanting and truly moving place. From the tawdriness of the town bazaar, to the steaming momos (dumplings) at Gompu’s shack, and the mountain mist ‘charging down like a dragon, dissolving, undoing, making ridiculous the drawing of borders’, Desai captures the character of the Darjeeling hills and bodies it forth in all its exuberance, madness, wistfulness and colour. She deserves her Booker Prize for this alone.
Yet her portrayal of the complex politics of the region, which has been parcelled up and handed between kings, empresses and governments for centuries, and the violent separatist passions that simmer and flare among rival groups there, is equally strong. With a little probing, the wilderness that at first seems so idyllic and peaceful reveals itself as a warren of grudges and suspicions, in which tensions mount and occasionally explode.
Desai captures this mixture of sleepiness and sudden, violent action perfectly. In fact, if anything, it informs the book a little too much, being subsumed into the plot so that it too moves sleepily, punctuated here and there by frenetic events, and finally fades into the mist. While some readers may find this frustrating, no-one can dispute Desai’s skill in getting under the skin of the society she portrays and tracing the threads that connect individual lives to the making and breaking of nations. Naipaul himself could do no more.
Photo by Steve Lennon.