A Study of Selected Fiction by Indian W Om En N Ovelists in English
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Mothers and Daughters: A Study of Selected Fiction by Indian W om en N ovelists in English Arpana Nath Departm ent of H um anities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology G uw ahati G uw ahati -- 781039, India April 2010 Mothers and Daughters: A Study of Selected Fiction by Indian W om en N ovelists in English A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Arpana N ath R oll N o. 05614103 Departm ent of H um anities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology G uw ahati G uw ahati -- 781039, India April 2010 TH-953_05614103 Dedicated to my parents TH-953_05614103 STATEMEN T I hereby declare that the matter embodied in this thesis, entitled Mothers and Daughters: A Study of Selected Fiction by Indian Women Novelists in English, is the result of research carried out by me in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India under the supervision of Dr. Rohini Mokashi-Punekar, Associate Professor, in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. Arpana Nath Research Scholar IIT Guwahati Department of Humanities & Social Sciences April 2010 Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati TH-953_05614103 Indian Institute of Technology G uw ahati Department of Humanities & Social Sciences Guwahati - 781 039 Assam, INDIA Phone: +91-361-2582555 Dr. Rohini Mokashi-Punekar Fax: +91-361-2582599 Associate Professor Email: [email protected] [email protected] C ER TIFIC ATE It is certified that the matter embodied in the thesis entitled Mothers and Daughters: A Study of Selected Fiction by Indian Women Novelists in English, submitted for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Arpana Nath, a student of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India, has been carried out under my supervision. It is also certified that this work has not been submitted anywhere else for the award of a research degree. Dr. Rohini Mokashi-Punekar Associate Professor IIT Guwahati Department of Humanities & Social Sciences April 2010 Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati TH-953_05614103 AC K N O W LEDG EMEN T I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Rohini Mokashi-Punekar for her involvement and advice during the process of writing the dissertation and for helping to make this an educational process at so many levels. I also extend a sincere thanks to my doctoral committee members for their time and feedback during this process. Special thanks go to Dr. Abhigyan Prasad for sharing his experience of the dissertation writing process with me and for his help in editing the final draft of the dissertation. I also wish to express my sincere appreciation to my fellow students at the Department, and to several colleagues who have assisted me one way or another. I feel very much indebted to you all. Special thanks go to my friend Sumitra Shukla for patiently listening to my complaints and frustrations and for helping me at any time I needed it. Thank you all for sharing my passion for learning and for being so much fun to be with. Most importantly, I wish to thank my parents for their unstinted support and encouragement to pursue my interests. I could not have accomplished this project without their concessions in family time. Thank you for teaching me to believe in myself. TH-953_05614103 Table of C ontents Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Mothers and Daughters: Themes and Contexts 39 Chapter 3 Feminist Mothers 84 Chapter 4 Difficult Mothers 109 Chapter 5 Mothers as Matriarchs 145 Chapter 6 Conclusion 179 Bibliography TH-953_05614103 Chapter 1 Introduction The subject of women’s writing represents an intervention within feminist studies in India that explores the psychological, emotional and social concerns of women. Much attention has been paid by feminist scholars in recovering lost traditions of writing by women writers. The idea behind this is to pay emphasis on the woman’s perspective and on the nature of experiences that shape women’s identity, the processes of self-formation and identification. It is not only difficult but also impossible to give a single voice to women’s writing in general as the variety of responses and artistic expressions mirror the complex patterns of social and cultural spaces that define the parameters of women’s lives and women’s responses to them in everyday situations. This precludes any attempt at generalized assumptions of gender. Women in different parts of the world are affected differently by the demands of cultural and material reality. What remains important, however, is the uniqueness of the experiences captured through the written word in the stories told thereby making visible the interior lives of a set of people that would otherwise have remained closed and unavailable. Writings by women throw light on aspects of women’s experience and their inner life, on the recesses of the mind that are silenced by codes of cultural conditioning that privileges reticence over expression in women. These writings are significant as they give the reader local specifity and grounding. Not only that but also they show the intricate ways in which women’s lives are deeply embedded in the cultural matrix of patriarchal structures. TH-953_05614103 2 The issue of women’s writing has raised many questions not only on the issue of women’s self-expression and creativity through the medium of the written word but also on the validity of the enterprise itself as a separate genre of literary studies. Elaine Showalter, who first coined the term “gynocriticism”, traces the history of women’s writing in the west as having evolved through a series of interrelated phases of development characterized by intense conflict and repression. As early as the 1920’s Virginia Woolf had insisted on the importance of economic independence and privacy for women writers. The works of Showalter and Woolf are important to our understanding of women’s writing as a genre. Showalter’s work apart from analyzing the different stages of the development of women’s writing also foregrounded the psychological pressure women authors had to undergo writing under the influence of a largely masculine canon. The effects of the “anxiety of authorship” (Bloom “The Anxiety of Influence”) and what could have been the effects of psychosocial repression for women artists because of societal intolerance of female creativity has been analyzed by Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar in their book The Mad Woman in the Attic (2001). Virginia Woolf’s work, on the other hand, was a penetrating analysis of the impediments to women’s literary creation that discouraged professional women writers. According to Woolf, Victorian women will have to kill the angel in the house in order to find the leisure and economic means to reach creative fulfillment. Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women” was one of the earliest attempts at excavating the material conditions and the implications they had for women writers. The articulation of gender concerns is not the same for different cultures and times, as the constitution of gender itself is culture-specific. The insights provided by the discussion of the above works on women’s writing provide us a useful opening for a TH-953_05614103 3 discussion of women’s writing in India and its historical and cultural antecedents. The publication of the anthology Women Writing in India (1993, 1999) by Susie Tharu and K Lalita in the nineties gave a new visibility to creative writing by women not just in contemporary times but over two centuries of writings by women with very marginal representation in the mainstream literary tradition. It is almost two decades now since the two volumes were published and the scene today is quite different as the rapidly increasing presence of women writers of fiction in English is too significant and exciting for anyone to miss or overlook (Bharat 11-12). Along with the growing number of women writers of fiction in India is the equally significant visibility of the number of critics in English. Meenakshi Mukherjee, Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan and Rukmini Bhaya Nair to name a few, are among the many who figure prominently in the critical literature produced on Postcolonial writing by women. These writers and critics together may be said to have contributed to establishing standards for creative writing by women. Not only have they succeeded in bringing awareness about writing by women in English but they have also succeeded in drawing attention to writing by women in the various Indian languages. This has been made possible through translations which have helped to create a new niche for women in terms of publishing and attracting the attention of the world to their writing. In fact contemporary Indian women writers in English are quite aware of their unique location. Critics like Meenakshi Mukherjee have drawn attention to the largely metropolitan hue that characterizes women’s fiction in English in India. According to her this spurt in writing by women is a “phenomenon emerging from a particular class of the urban elite” (“Women Creative Writers” 18). It is therefore not possible to read English texts by Indian women novelists in the same way we read texts by western women in English as TH-953_05614103 4 in the case of Indian women writers, the choice of language, that is, English, “is an act of aesthetic or political option loaded with historical meaning… Historically English in India cannot be regarded as a transparent value neutral medium of communication” (11-12). In other words, we cannot ignore the class bias of English writing in India. Though concerns about female identity still continue to be the predominant themes, these writers have shown a desire to explore issues that go beyond the problems of gender to the negotiation of other themes like postcoloniality, nationality and history.