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LIRJELL ISSN: 2348-1617 The Story of the Marginalised in Graham Green’s Fiction Dr Meena Malik Associate Professor, NDRI Deemed University, Karnal, Haryana Graham Greene is widely acknowledged as a major British novelist who rode the crest of popularity for the greater part of twentieth century. In a successful literary career spanning over six decades, Greene wrote over twenty novels besides a number of short stories, plays, memoirs, travel books, children’s books, reviews, essays, a biography and two volumes of autobiography. It is noteworthy that out of the twenty-five novels, from The Man Within (1929) to The Captain and the Enemy (1988) produced by Graham Greene, none is gifted with a female protagonist. The fundamental fact of male domination over women could be discerned in all walks of life in almost all his novels. Women characters in his novels never take the center of the story line, although incredibly essential for understanding of the novel. It seems as if they exist simply as mere ‘corollaries’ or ‘appendages’ for the better understanding of the male hero or anti-hero. They are essentially passive creatures whose task is to illumine and motivate the dynamic character of their male counterpart. John Atkin’s book Graham Greene (1957) offers some stray but useful cues to the understanding of women characters. One can endorse Atkin’s view that women exist merely “as corollaries to men helping or hindering some vital masculine action”. 1 The women in Greene’s fiction fulfill all the necessary conditions, which make them true ‘feminine’ figures. True to the concept propounded by Mary Ellmann in her book, Thinking About Women (1968) 2, Greene’s women perfectly hold true all the eleven major stereotypes of femininity as presented by most of the male writers and critics such as formlessness, passivity, instability, confinement, piety, materiality, spirituality, irrationality, compliancy and finally ‘the two incorrigible figures’ of the witch and the shrew. One after the other, all Greene’s novels are cluttered with feminine stereotypes. Greene unremittingly denies women their fair participation in socio-economic spheres that matter and excludes them from the positions of command and influence. They either exist as playthings or stuff of pleasure or as a vital support for encouraging some crucial male action. The capricious, wilful and bizarre heroes steal the attention in Greene’s male oriented narratives; there is not even a single intellectual woman in Greene’s fictional world that is self-actualising or has an identity of her own. The distinctive voice of the woman is muted and muffled in Greene’s novels because Greene fails to give a ISSUE II: Marginalisation July-August, 2014 P a g e | 56 LIRJELL ISSN: 2348-1617 truthful picture of women. Greene’s women are dispossessed of their existence as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ beings and denied the right to subjectivity and accountability. Graham Greene’s fiction reveals that majority of the female characters are marginalized and conventional women characters. Kay Rimmer and Milly in It’s a Battlefield (1934), Kate and Loo in England Made Me (1935), Anne in A Gun for Sale (1936), Rose in Brighton Rock (1938), and Louise and Helen in The Heart of the Matter (1948) - all the female characters are in need of male support and patronage in some form or the other for their continued existence in the male- dominated world. They are constantly haunted by a sense of alienation and hostility of the world. Each of the characters has one’s own way of reacting to the hostilities of the outside world. Kay Rimmer in It’s a Battlefield and Loo in England Made Me use their sexuality to overcome the sense of meaninglessness in their otherwise empty lives whereas Milly in It’s a Battlefield, Anne in A Gun for Sale, Rose in Brighton Rock, and Louise and Helen in The Heart of the Matter lack autonomy and self-sufficiency and look up to their male counterparts for their day-to-day survival. The two main women characters in The Man Within (1929) Elizabeth and Lucy, are presented as crude stereotypes of love and lust. According to Patricia Ingham, “Woman can be angelically intuitive or intuitively capricious, willfully silly, both angel and the ninny are part of the same signification of ‘woman’.” 3 Despite the aura built around Elizabeth, she hardly comes to life. Elizabeth is insufficiently developed as a character outside her victimization to gain our attention. Lucy, on the other hand is depicted as a sex doll existing merely to gratify the sexual needs of men that matter. Coral Musker in Stamboul Train (1932) is the true ‘feminine’ figure who like a live doll surrenders herself in the hands of Myatt. She is the victim of her vicious circumstances. She looks for some support and protection as she lacks confidence to manage herself in an estranged and hostile world. As a result she is completely bogged down by the inherent gender conditioning and becomes another representative feminine figure of fragmented self, symbolizing emotional repression and sexual inhibition. On the contrary the ‘manly’ Mabel Warren in Stamboul Train (1932), for all her courage to swim against the current, is inevitably a loser who grapples to win for herself the possibility of a more authentic existence through her intensely privatised world of personal emotions. Mabel is unable to reconcile with the contradictory needs of the self. She suffers from inferiority complex and a sense of failure that acts as an obstacle in her quest for wholeness and a full and vibrant life. ISSUE II: Marginalisation July-August, 2014 P a g e | 57 LIRJELL ISSN: 2348-1617 Subservience and subordination is considered to be an irrevocable ‘given’ of women’s condition just as timidity and docility are deemed to be essentialist components of the female conduct. The burden of marriage weighs much more heavily upon woman than upon man. Graham Greene very realistically puts forth the unhappy lot of woman and the iniquities of the marriage system in The Quiet American (1955) through Fowler’s estranged wife. The good- natured, cooperative, loving and caring heroines of Greene’s novels have their own significance. Their sudden appearance in the novels is always soothing for the lonely, frustrated, exhausted and hunted heroes. Elizabeth in The Man Within (1929), Ann Crowder in A Gun for Sale, (1936) Anna Hilfe in The Ministry of Fear (1943), Rose Cullen in The Confidential Agent (1939) become symbols of peace and tremendous relief for their male counterparts. Milly in It’s a Battlefield (1934), Rose in Brighton Rock (1938), Maria in The Power and the Glory (1943), Louise and Helen in The Heart of the Matter (1948) and Lisa in The Captain and the Enemy (1988) epitomize the enormous patience, fortitude, capacity for endurance of suffering and resilience on the part of women. Greene’s novels amply prove that woman in all the roles is subjected to continual oppression in her subordination to man whether it is that of a wife and the mother, the prostitute, the spinster, the mistress, the redundant middle or the old aged woman. The images of women are so various and contradictory that she is at once Eve and Virgin Mary. She is an idol as well as the servant. She is the source of life and at the same time a power of darkness too. She like Elizabeth in The Man Within (1929) is the elemental silence of truth as well as the artifice, gossip and falsehood. “ ‘To be a woman’, says Kierkgaard in Stages on the Road of Life, ‘is something so strange, so confused, so complicated, that no one predicate comes near expressing it and that multiple predicates that one would like to use are so contradictory that only a woman can put up with it’ ” 4 Greene oscillates between two extremes in presenting his woman characters. Women in Greene’s novels are either too submissive or domesticated or too unreal caricatures with only a few exceptions like Cary in Loser Takes All (1955) and Sarah Castle in The Human Factor (1978). Women in Greene’s fiction are too indecisive, sensuous, timid, submissive, innocent, thus, making it incumbent upon men to protect them, or too liberated, voluptuous and obsessed or hysterical like Mabel Warren in Stamboul Train (1932), Ida Arnold in Brighton Rock (1938), the lesbian manageress in The Confidential Agent (1939), Aunt Augusta in Travels with My Aunt (1969), or Sylvia in The Human Factor (1978). This proves that deviation from certain ISSUE II: Marginalisation July-August, 2014 P a g e | 58 LIRJELL ISSN: 2348-1617 conventional images lead to explicit aberrations, which are otherwise totally unconvincing and unacceptable. Generally speaking, Greene portrays either the conventional images or the false images of women because they take shape in opposition to the “real person” whom the novels never quite manage to convey. Consequently, the man-woman relationship in Greene is usually dilapidated into shaky no-win situation leading to sexual repugnance, betrayed trust and busted homes. Another issue that catches immediate attention in Graham Greene’s novels is the female- body-image and its construction and the male gaze and the dominance, which it exerts. Staring has become a crucial aspect of sexual relations, not because of any natural impulse, but because it is one of the ways in which domination and subordination is expressed. The controlling effects of the male gaze are, of course, apparent in other areas besides personal relationships. A significant illustration of the power it wields is the circulation of images of women produced by the media and industry. The effects of such images are, on the whole, exploitative and oppressive reducing her to voyeuristically as a ‘spectacle’.