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One of the problems I've had to face as a writer is the isolation one works in when one writes in English in India - an isolation that is emphasised when one is a woman. Writing in English in India, one feels sadly out of the mainstream. For me, the problems amounted to this: there was nothing, nobody I could model myself on. What all he English writing by Indian writers meant to me was this -I could only tell myself I don't want to write like this, not like this, not like this. One does not often think of this question, but sometimes it looms large and then you ask yourself. Where do I belong?.... 'The Dilemma of the Woman Writer' - that seems too vast, too pretentious a title for these tentative suggestions. What I'm really talking about is: What it means to be a woman writer. It's ironic that I should use this phrase, for I find the use of the phrase "woman writer" both intriguing and irritating. I too have thought - when it isn't "woman singer" and "woman dancer", why is it "woman writer"? I have possible answer to that: it's because a woman who writes is put in a separate class. She is not a writer who happens to be a woman. She is, specifically, a woman writer and should be judged as such. Well, I'm using the phrase myself now, because I'm talking of what it means to be woman and a writer. These are all purely subjective theories- that came out t of practice. I mean, like it always is: I started writing first; the thinking about it came much later. To start off, I wrote exactly what came into my mind. And yet (I saw this much later, not at the moment of writing, nor immediately afterwards.) I occasionally found myself slipping into having a male narrator, a sort of male "I". I didn't think much of the why's and how's of this, until I got a letter from an editor to whom I'd sent a short story of mine. The editor rejected the story - that's fine, one gets used to that - but the suggestion that irked me was the gratuitous advice given to me by the editor: 'Why don't you try this in a woman's magazine?' After the anger died down, I began to wonder: Why did the editor say that? It was a good story. I knew that. I was pretty confident about it. It was not a sentimental, romantic love story either, the kind that would fit smugly into a woman's magazine. Then why was suggestion made? Is it, I wondered, because a woman's experiences are considered to be of interest only to women? Is it because women's concerns, a woman's way of looking at the world, are considered to have no interest for anyone but women? And then, for the first time I began to think about the male 'I'. in my stories. I remembered what a friend had said to me about such a story. 'If I hadn't known that you've written this story, I'd have imagined the writer to be a man.' And I remembered how pleased I had been by this statement. Why did I have the male 'I'? Did I do it to distance myself from the subject? Or had I done that because I, too, had felt that there was something trivial about women's concerns, something very limited about their interests and experiences? Had I been, without my knowledge, so brainwashed that I had begun regarding women's experiences as second-rate? Had I, too, begun thinking that women's writing was sentimental and emotional, and so having a male narrator helped me to pare down the emotions, to intellectualise it ? But, the fact was that both the intellect and the emotions were mine. This conclusion inevitably followed this question. Yet the fact remains that I was trying to use an equivalent of the male pseudonym which so many women employed to conceal their identities. In other words, the writer in me was rejecting her femininity. Perhaps I had the idea that to be taken seriously as a writer, I had to get out of my woman's skin. Perhaps, on another level, this was an answer to the question so often posed to me: Why do you write only about women? A question so often asked that I tend to get defensive about it. Then about the critics. It is a curious fact that serious writing by women is invariably regarded as feminist writing. A woman who writes of women's experiences often brings in some aspects of those experiences that have angered her, roused her strong feelings. I don't see why this has to be labelled feminist fiction. A (male) critic said about a novel of mine: "she can be quite brilliant when she is not raising her banners of protest." Any woman who writes fiction shows the world as it looks to her protagonist; if the protagonist is a woman, she shows the world as it looks to a woman. This view, I have realised makes a man quite uncomfortable. But to present this viewpoint is not necessarily to be a feminist. It seems that it is, on the whole, difficult for a woman to be judged purely as a writer. To the critics one is a woman writer. I know literature has to be valued in the social context; but to apply the tag of feminist is one way, I've realised of dismissing the serious concerns of the novel by labelling them, by calling the work propagandist. It's like saying that when a man writes of the particular problems a man is facing, he is writing male propaganda. Nobody says that. Why is it said only about women writers? There is no doubt that some of women's writing is propagandist. Marilyn French's Women's Room, for example. The extreme stances taken there - all men are sadists, brutes and all women are victims - are an exaggeration of what is done more subtly in some other novels. In these novels one goes to the other extreme from the romantic 'moonlight and roses' kind of fiction. The author has let anger carry her away. It brings to my mind Virginia Woolf's famous statement about anger getting in the way. This is, I feel, really the woman novelist's dilemma- you are caught between these two extremes - the unreal world of romance, and this exaggerated world of "shit and beans' (Marilyn French's catch phrase expressing a woman's problems.). One way out of it seems to be the one Doris Lessing has chosen - getting away altogether out of this world -she has literally got into space, though, this writing seems to me far inferior to her earlier writing which was more woman-oriented. I wonder sometimes whether she has this same feeling - that she was limiting herself by writing about women. These are others like Erica Jong and Lisa Alther who have concealed anger beneath humour The women in their novels clown their way through their predicaments. It is as if they are saying: 'I know I don't expect you to take me seriously.' It seems to me, however, that one has to go through this phase of anger. Oven if such writings is tainted, it has its place as leading on to something else. All this kind of writing - feminist, humorous, pornographic - has its place in women's writing, as it has in writing by men. For women, particularly, after so many years of silence, there is bound to be some exaggeration, some extravagance. It's like letting a youngster loose in the world, after years of strict discipline, Women have every right to express themselves in any way they want to. What matters in their writing, as in the writing of men, is sincerity integrity and professionalism. Women's writing is more tainted, it seems to me, by lack of professionalism than anything else. What is wrong is that the women who write romances, mysteries, historical fiction and serious fiction are all lumped together as women writers. |