Middle Flight Ssm Journal of English Literature

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ISSN 2319 – 7684

MIDDLE FLIGHT SSM JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

SUKUMAR SENGUPTA MAHAVIDYALAYA KESHPUR , PASCHIM MEDINIPUR PIN: 721150 , WEST BENGAL , INDIA

Vol.-1 November 2012 No.-1

ISSN 2319 – 7684

MIDDLE FLIGHT SSM JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

SUKUMAR SENGUPTA MAHAVIDYALAYA KESHPUR , PASCHIM MEDINIPUR PIN: 721150 , WEST BENGAL , INDIA

Vol.-1 November, 2012 No.-1

MIDDLE FLIGHT

SSM JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Advisory Editorial Board :

1. Professor Parbati Charan Chakraborty, Professor and Head (Ret.), Deptt. of English, The University of Burdwan & Visiting Professor of English , Aliah University, Kolkata

2. Professor Tirthankar Daspurkayastha, Professor of English and Head, Deptt. of English, Vidyasagar University

3. Professor Sankar Prasad Singha, Professor of English ,Vidyasagar University

4. Dr. Goutam Buddha Sural, Associate Professor & Head, Deptt. of English, Bankura Christian College (PG) and Visiting Fellow (2006), Bristol University (UK)

5. Dr. Binda Sharma, Associate Professor and Head, Deptt. of English, C.M.D. PG College, Bilaspur

6. Mr. Satyaki Pal, Associate Professor, Deptt. of English, Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (Autonomous)

Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Debdas Roy, Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) and Head, Deptt. of English, S.S. Mahavidyalaya

Published: November, 2012

ISSN: 2319 – 7684

Published By: Executive Committee, Sukumar Sengupta Mahavidyalaya Po. Keshpur, Dt. Paschim Medinipur, Pin: 721150 Ph: 03227-250861, Mail: [email protected]

@ Reserved with Executive Committee, 2012 Price: Rs.100/

Editorial

The idea of launching a journal from so new a college and so small a department was just a straw in the wind. When the idea was in the embryo my Good Angel came to deliver a timely ‘commandment’: “Don’t go too near the sun”. Thus warned and aided I undertook my middle flight. They say metaphors are lies and hence the image of a motley coat, patched but clean that aptly defines ‘our’ Middle Flight. Exercise, with a pen or without, keeps one warm. It is a survival strategy – therapeutic too. Capacity and commitment never go paired. Fund is a major problem, experience no less. Yet the ‘the mind is its own place’ and is convinced that some ‘work’, noble or ignoble, may yet be done. The launching of the first issue of Middle Flight would hardly be possible without the unstinted support from my teachers, employers, editors, executive members, top guns of the ISSN of India, my colleagues (within the college premises and without) and my beloved students. Congrats to all concerned for making it possible. The readers only know what is in store for us – bouquets or brickbats!

Debdas Roy

CONTENTS

Tapan Jyoti Banerjee: English Literature of the Seventeenth Century: A Brief Look in Terms of Continuity

Parbati Charan Chakraborty Towards A Note Of Interrogation: A Study of The Winter’s Tale

Tirthankar Daspurkayastha Re-reading Shakespeare with special reference to Macbeth

Satiprasad Maity: ‘… more perjured eye’ : the Paradox of vision in the Dark Lady Sonnets

Satyaki Pal: From the Metaphysicals to the Neoclassicists: The Changing notion of Wit in the Seventeenth Century Poetry

Indranil Acharya: The Problematics of Gender Identity in the Early Poetry of T. S. Eliot

Subhajit Sengupta Generic Strategies and theProblematization of History in Henry V

Binda Sharma: Feminism – When does it really start in India?

Bijay Kant Dubey: Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla as a Poet: A Study of His Poetry

Sanjay Mukherjee: Interrogating Kingship in King Lear

Sudip Kr. Das: A Muse to the poet: ‘One rare fair woman’ in Thomas Hardy’s life

Debdas Roy: A Journey from inaction (Akarma) to action (karma): Hamlet and Arjuna in the light of ‘Niskam Karma’

Sunita Tiwari: The Apprentice and Awakened Conscience

Satyaranjan Das: Self-interest: The Real Guide in R.K.Narayan’s The Guide

Aloy Chand Biswas: Responses to India – Naipaul, N.C.Chaudhuri, Rushdie and R.K.Narayan: A Comparative Study

Arup Ratan Chakraborty: Tuberculosis and Nineteenth Century Literature: Aestheticization of the Malady as a ‘Romantic Disease’

Asit Panda: Sanctifying Slaughter: Predatory Culture in Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’

Samit Kr. Maiti: East-West Synthesis: Rabindranath Tagore, the Janus-headed Nationalist

Subrata Sahoo Gala of Friendship and Male-heroism: An Approach to Tennyson’s Ulysses

Bisweshwar Chakraborty Nation as Woman / Mother: A Critique of Bankimchandra’s Anandamath

Paromita Deb: Body Image in King Lear

Soumen Chatterjee: The Lady or the Lord? Gender Politics in ‘The Lady of Shallot’

Anupam Santra: Waiting for Godot: A Play about Man and Religion

Contributors: (2012)

1. Professor Tapan Jyoti Banerjee, Professor of English (Retd.), Vidyasagar University and Editor-in-Chief, LITSCAPE (ISSN 0976- 9064) 2. Professor Parbati Charan Chakraborty, Professor and Head (Rtd.), Department of English, The University Burdwan &Visiting Professor of English, Aliah University, Kolkata

3. Professor Tirthankar Daspurkayastha, Professor of English and Head, Deptt. of English, Vidyasagar University

4. Satiprasad Maity, Associate Professor and Head, Deptt. of English, Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (Autonomous)

5. Mr. Satyaki Pal, Associate Professor, Deptt. of English, Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (Autonomous) 6. Dr.Indranil Acharya, Reader, ,Deptt. of English, Vidyasagar University and Deputy Coordinator, UGC-SAP 7. Dr. Subhajit Sengupta, Assistant Professor, Deptt. of English, Vidtasagar University. 8. Dr. (Mrs.) Binda Sharma, Head, Department of English , CMD Post Graduate College, Bilaspur (C.G.)

9. Dr. Bijay Kant Dubey, Reader & Head, Deptt. of English & Co- ordinator, NSOU Centre, C.V. Mahavidyalaya, Area of research: Indian English Writings 10. Mr. Sanjay Mukherjee, Associate Professor & Head, Deptt. of English, Tamralipta Mahavidyalaya, Area of research: Shakespearean Drama

11. Mr. Sudip Kr. Das, Selection Grade Lecturer & Head, Deptt. of English, Hijli College, Area of research: Thomas Hardy 12. Dr. Debdas Roy, Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) & Head, Deptt. of English, S.S. Mahavidyalaya, Area of research: John Donne 13. Dr Mrs Sunita Tiwari, Assistant Professor, Deptt. of English, CMD PG College, Bilaspur, Area of research: 14. Mr. Satyaranjan Das, Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer), Deptt. of English, Moyna College, Area of research: Indian English Writings 15. Mr. Aloy Chand Biswas, Assistant Professor & Head, Deptt. of English, Egra S. S. B. College, Area of research: V.S. Naipaul 16. Mr. Arup Ratan Chakraborty, Assistant Professor & Head, Deptt. of English, S.B.S.S. Mahavidyalaya, Area of research: Ezekiel, Moraes, Daruwalla and Jussawalla 17. Mr. Asit Panda, Assistant Professor, Deptt. of English, Belda College, Area of research: Wole Soyinka 18. Mr. Samit Kr. Maiti, Assistant Professor & Head, Deptt. of English, Seva Bharati Mahavidyalaya, Area of research: R.N.Tagore 19. Mr. Subrata Sahoo, Assistant Professor, Deptt. of English, Contai P.K. College, Area of research: Indian English Writings 20. Mr. Bisweshwar Chakraborty, Assistant Professor, Deptt. of English, Jhargram Raj College, Area of research: Indian English Writings 21. Dr. Paromita Deb, Guest Lecturer, Deptt. of English, Hijli College, Area of research: Elizabethan Drama (Ph.D.) and Indian English Writings, Diaspora Studies, Partition Lit. (Post-doc) 22. Mr. Soumen Chatterjee, Assistant Professor in FDP, Deptt. of English, Mahishadal Raj College 23. Mr.Anupam Santra, PTT, Deptt. of English, S.S. Mahavidyalaya

English Literature of the Seventeenth Century: A Brief Look in Terms of Continuity

Tapan Jyoti Banerjee

Tidy divisions of literary history can lead to misconceptions. To say that the “Jacobean age” began with the accession of James I in 1630 is certainly not to suggest that a dramatic change of mood also took place around that time. Is “Jacobean melancholy” an acceptable concept any more? The idea of “Jacobean mutability” is also on its way to obsolescence. In fact, the most sensible thing would be to see the late Renaissance in England as one whole movement … experiencing changes of government, but following (at the same time) its own internal logic. The closing down of the theatres in 1642 dealt a major blow to literature in some minor ways. But the literary modes and genres through the 17th century developed … or declined …following their own laws rather than the fluctuations in the political field.

While Walter Raleigh (c. 1552) ignored the Renaissance reassertion of the dignity of man, George Chapman’s (c. 1559) view appeared (much) more forward- looking betraying the newer attitudes extolling human value. At Chapman’s hands Ulysses is turned into a type of Renaissance hero, overcoming temptation and yielding examples of prudence and fortitude. But Francis Bacon was easily the most influential writer of the whole century. He was committed to upholding the Renaissance concept of vita activa – the life dedicated to serving society. He mixed ‘profit’ with ‘delight’, analysed cause and effect in social and psychological terms, and set out to defend the pursuit of knowledge snapping his finger at such stigma as 'forbidden knowledge’, which scientific research during the Renaissance had the misfortune of labouring under. Bacon, prompted by his concern for providing both profit and delight, wrote with obvious affection of the combined attractions of the masque: “Dancing to song is a thing of great state and pleasure.” The masque became very popular in the years between 1605 and 1640. The masque can be seen as conspicuous consumption, a sign of decadence, or, as the apotheosis of the arts. Its disappearance coincided with the growth of public crises in the 1640s.

In verse, formal satire found a sudden maturity (in the works of Joseph Hall, John Donne and John Marston). Epigram – a specific verse form connected with satire – flourished. In drama, tragi-comedy and pastoral play were imported from Italy.

The prose arena saw the growth of a whole series of genres: the Essay and its related genre Paradox (or, mock-encomium) being the foremost. The new genres did not come out of the blue, but were imported from continental Europe. [Montaigne served as the continental model for Essay, Ortesio Lando as the model of Paradox, Cassaubon’s Latin translation of Theophrastus for Character].This

1 certainly was possible because of the Englishman’s classical education – thanks to the Renaissance. All the writers between 1610 and 1630 were university-educated and keen students of Latin and Greek classics.

John Donne, in his love poetry, breaks with the tradition of the 16th century love poetry where the mistress is remote and unattainable, but the lover (the poet) finds continuing inspiration from his frustration. “Where other poets place their mistress on a pedestal, he (Donne) puts her in bed, next to him” … says Brian Vickers. By describing consummation of love Donne regenerated love poetry. In a sense, at his hands all the promises and potentials of man-woman love of the Renaissance found fulfillment and realisation. Ben Jonson maintained a constant attitude to life, language, and poetry in all his poems. He shared the fundamental belief of Renaissance humanists that the ‘good poet’ must first be a ‘good man’, an educator and guardian of morality.

Herbert, Vaughan, Herrick, Carew, Suckling, Cowley – all these poets carried on the legacy of Donne and Ben Jonson in one way or the other. In Cowley’s Davideis, A Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David (1656), a worthy biblical pastiche and in Gondibert (1650) by Sir William Davenant (1605-68) we see how a genre like the Renaissance epic can persist beyond its time and be practised without conviction or need. Milton showed that the Renaissance epic was not wholly dead, after all. Samuel Butler brought new life to epic through parody and the mock-heroic. His Hudibras (1663) is a prophetic example. Swift and Gay would be the heirs of Butler, while Denham and Waller served as models for Dryden and Pope. Death of one literary mode led to the birth of another, as it were. In a very special sense this is a very productive continuity, indicating the innate, inevitable vitality of the process of literary growth. However, religious poetry of the kind written by Crashaw (1613-49) and Thomas Traherne (1637-74) left no impact on the succeeding generation of poets. The sense of a loss of coherence is too apparent in the mid 17th century religious poetry.

A word about Milton (1608-74), whose ‘epic’ contribution I mentioned a little earlier. Milton carried on the Renaissance ethos. The final sentence of Areopagitica reads: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” In his representative poems he stood by the Renaissance opposition between virtue and pleasure. L’Allegro and Il Penseroso (1630) illustrate this principle, and it is one of the right clues to the right interpretation of Comus (1634). In one episode in his monody in the form of pastoral lament, Lycidas (1637), he poses a question: ‘Why should one strictly meditate the thankless muse instead of indulging in amorous pleasure?’ His answer is:

(the orthodox Renaissance humanist belief that)

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

To scorn delights, and live laborious days. . .

Milton makes Paradise Lost into an epic without a hero. Like all Renaissance writers, Milton wants his readers to recognise evil in his epic and detest it, but he does not fail to add his own moral judgements to reinforce the readers. Two other long poems of his treat temptation and fortitude as themes: these two are Samson Agonistes (1647 – 53?) and Paradise Regained (1667-70). In both the poems the heroes triumph, and belong to the exemplary pattern of normal Renaissance epic (even though Samson Agonistes is in the form of classical tragedy).

Andrew Marvell (1621-78) would lend himself wonderfully well to our basic premise of continuity and regeneration of literature in its major forms through the 17th century. He is a Renaissance poet – heir to a tradition going to back to Virgil and Horace, Cicero and Plato, a tradition of involvement with the state in ethical and political terms. He believes (like Milton does, or Sidney or Spenser) that the poet has a responsible role in society. He follows Donne, too – he blends lyricism with wit and paradox. But while inheriting and revitalizing a tradition he also heralds a new age. The Rehearsal Transposed (1672-3) – his prose satire anticipates Swift. He also absorbs Dryden’s new style (in the satiric couplets of his The Last Instruction to a Painter, 1667). Seventeenth century English literature is , on the whole, remarkable for its ability to find fresh forms for new experiences. Marvell sums up this ability.

I have, so far, spoken more or less in favour of continuity, or, in a sense, development of literary forms through the 17th century. After writing the above paragraphs in support of my contention I happened to read Robert D. Hume’s The Development of English Drama in the Late 17th Century. In Chapter I of the book, “What is ‘Restoration’ drama?” he writes :

Students raised on the literary history implicit in survey courses come unthinkingly to believe in tidy, necessary, forward movement. Etherege exists to mould Congreve’s form; Defoe helps establish the realism and individuality in the novel which will make Richardson possible … The Carolean drama is … seen largely as a prelude leading toward triumph (The Way of the World) and collapse (the onset of sentimental drama)…

He also says: “The usual notions of ‘development’ are simplistic nonsense.” But, interestingly, later, in the same chapter, he would say: “My procedure in tracing ‘development’ will be to look for trends in a large number of plays over fairly short spans of time. Only very rough classifications need be made.” Still later, “What I trace will not show ‘development’ in any neat, tidy, and sophisticated sense…”

In fact, Hume seems to be more concerned with the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’ of development – ‘how the drama changed rather than why’. But the ‘how’ carries the seed of ‘why’, doesn’t it? I do not see any harm at all in going for an exercise that would take us into both the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of changes and development over a period of time, not necessarily short.

The Restoration period – the second half of the 17th century – is seen as a kind of preface to the 18th century literary history. This second half (of the 17th

3 century) is dominated by drama. There is a difference of opinion regarding the years which the term ‘restoration’ is meant to include. Most commonly, it is 1660-1700; but extension is often made to 1707 and even to 1737. The 1660-1700 concept, of course, has the virtue of tidiness. Jeremy Collier’s blast in 1698 paves the way for Congreve’s failure in 1700 and the appearance of Steele’s first play in 1701. This sequence constitutes a very tidy shift from Restoration to Sentimental Comedy. But most early 18th century drama can quite properly be viewed as outgrowth of late 17th century developments. The Licensing Act of 1737 again indicates governmental interference (after the reopening of the theatres in 1660) and is the appropriate termination point.

The sensible way to look at Restoration Drama is not to take it as an offshoot of French theatre or at least heavily influenced by it. It is part of a continuing tradition – as suggested by Bonamy Dobree (in Restoration Comedy) and Allardyce Nicoll (in History of English Drama 1660-1900) many years ago. We have now come to conclude that the native tradition in England has been so strong that anything incorporated into the English way of life is immediately adapted and anglicized to the point that whatever its origins it becomes essentially English. Thus the French influence on Restoration Drama is minimal.

It is also logical to think that there was a definite link between English dramatic writing before and after the Commonwealth period. The anarchy projected by the world described by Hobbes in his Leviathan (1651) was a replacement of the ideally stable and morally coherent model of the previous era, as exemplified in Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity (1593). This anarchy is common to dramas written before and after the commonwealth.

The Cavaliers’ hope in a series of absolute values such as love, honour and obedience to order is seriously questioned by the later generation after a period of twenty years of exile. A superficial study of the period of the immediate restoration of monarchy reveals an open license and libertinage. It is quite tempting to interpret (misinterpret?) the brazenness and unconcealed eroticism of the period in terms of a moral and social revolution. But the frantic nature of the overall atmosphere – the excess of excitement – has a sure suggestion of unreality. Underneath this picture of sensational debauchery we find an age of curiosity (of which certainly Dryden’s curiosity is also symptomatic) led to the founding of the Royal Society (1662). Curiously, the sexual attitudes get conditioned – at this time – by the curiosity and scientific reason. The ‘new’ men and women (of this time) go for an almost scientific experimentation by discovering and confirming – through their perceptions and actions – that sexual desire and love were two separate things.

After the collapse of the platonic code with Cromwell’s exit, the new code, discovered during the reign of Charles II and James II, paves the way, in both the tragedy and the comedy of these years, for a serious search for identity. In much of the bawdy element there is, in fact, a striving towards honesty and a serious attempt to discover anything, which might be there. While the pre-restoration comedy had attempted to expose the hidden recesses of human passion and desire, the comedy of

Etherege and Wycherley does not need to expose anything hidden and can simply show the same passions and desires as they appeared in daily life.

The difference between the Jacobean comedy and the Restoration comedy should not be discussed in terms of the degree of profundity but the degree of uncertainty. The latter is far more uncertain than the former. Similarly, the Restoration tragedy is in search of its heroes in unreality because of lack of any lasting heroism in its own age. Essentially, the subject matter of English plays before 1642 is identical with the subject matter of English drama in the 1680s and 1690s. Marston, Massinger and Shirley reveal what we can superficially (and anachronistically) call the Restoration flavour.

J.C. Thompson (in the book Fifty British Plays) in his essay “Audience and Taste” emphatically establishes that the ingredients of Restoration comedy exist in Jacobean drama and the later period continues and develops from the earlier.

So we will go by our ‘development and continuity’ theory rather than the theory of French imposition vis-à-vis Restoration drama.

Finally, looking at the so-called degeneration of the brilliance and sparkle of the Restoration comedy into the sentimental variety, one could relate the development to the emergence of a clearer sense of morality in the social outlook, rather than uninteresting and unappealing ‘coldness’. The drama becomes fundamentally more sober and affectionate and speaks of the deep sincerity of the new exponents of drama, who looked forward to an enlightened future with a careful, sober hope.

This responsibility to the future should be considered (as) a vital clue to the understanding of the drama from Steele onwards.

Works Cited

1. Dobree, Bonamy. Restoration Comedy 1660-1770. London: Oxford University P, 2003 (Paperback). Print. 2. Nicoll, Allardyce. A History of English Drama 1660-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1955. Print. 3. Thompson, J.C. Introduction to Fifty British Plays 1660-1900. Washington: Heinmann Educational Publisher, 1980. Print. 4. Vickers, Brian. English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University P, 2003 (paperback). Print.

Towards A Note of Interrogation: A Study of The Winter’s Tale

Parbati Charan Chakraborty

An irrational passion of jealousy apart, Shakeaspeare’s Winter’s Tale hears a note of regeneration and integration. So the play takes us beyond the limited and stereotyped theme. The sequence of repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation; the rain of music, dance and gaiety; the dents in love and friendship, and the healing of these by the passion of time; spring’s promise and autumn’s fruition; father’s and children, and the redemption of the former by the latter; the resurrection of the dead, the fulfillment of the Oracle, and the promise of a new heaven and a new earth- all these figure in the last two Acts, and sending creepers towards the earlier acts and entwining them to hold the whole play in an embrace of rounded revelation.

Shakespeare mighty sweep of passions, which brought forth the great tragedies, apparently reached its climax in the play, Timon of Athens, which is violently cynical in mood and theme. However, the dramatist's development was not complete because the last phase of his career was followed by a series of plays— Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest—written between 1608 and 1611. These plays are closely related to one another. However, thematic unity apart, these plays represent an effort to lend an artistic form to a new symbolic conception. Each of these plays responds to a definite continuity of purpose, a special feature of destruction and reconstruction connected through an intimate and organic human bond. The main figure, though swept away by a tragic intensity of feeling, is not convulsed by his inner fiery passion. Rather he is bruised by the evil doings of the people around him. A gradual estrangement occurs. But the young members of the new generation represented by Mariana in Pericles, Perdita in The Winter's Tale and Miranda in The Tempest effect reconciliation though forgiveness which plays a major role in dispelling the darkness enveloping human life.

It can scarcely be an accident that the change in Shakespeare's mood coincides with his return to Stanford. The dark issues of life which thrust themselves so pointedly on the mind of the playwright and which raised such a vortex of seething passions in his heart, were now eased out of his quiet life at home: here the silent glades and vales of Warwickshire coupled with mellow affections of his near ones produced in him a peculiar mood reflected in the last plays. Despite this mellow mood, here is a world where evil exists with all its maliciousness; but ripeness blended with innocence generates an atmosphere where the evildoer is reformed and reintegrated in the heightened scheme of existence.

Thus we find here, by the side of the world-worn sufferers like Hermione and Prospero, such blithe creatures with infinite gaiety of heart like Perdita and Miranda. These gracious beings are equally distinct from the grave, thoughtful children of earlier plays, like Arthur or Richard Ill's princely nephews, and from the brilliant, full-blooded figures in the hey-day of life, who sparkle through the comedies, like Rosalind or Beatrice.

The stuff and tone used in the last plays, appear to be close to us, but are more congenial either to the romantic novel or the romantic epic rather than to the plays. And as such, the looseness of structure which we note in the history plays has come back or rather the poet, supremely oblivious of the dramatic structure, brings varying strains together to create a symphony characteristic of a long narrative poem akin to a ballad. So after an absence of sixteen years, Perdita is suddenly revealed as a woman of marriageable age. Moreover, incidents like the repentance of lachimo are inadequately motivated; while among the minor figures, as in The Tempest, there are shadowy types, lacking the distinctive vitality of the minor characters in Shakespeare's earlier plays. But the three dramatic romances, Cymbeline, The Winter s Tale and The Tempest, illustrate the final phase of his art and outlook on life through varied symbols and images.

These features can be traced in The Winter s Tale which, however, cannot be considered from the plane of realistic representation. Its plot is perfectly adjusted to the new symbolic technique achieved though the use of different kinds of imagery. Such a technique is useful if only to get away from the idea of realistic drama, to see its various stages as the successive movements differing in feeling and tempo, which go to make up the unity of a symphony, hi accordance with this conception, the first movement would deal with the tragic break-up of the existing unity of Leontes and Polixenes, through the passionate folly of Leontes. Moved by morbid jealousy, which strongly reminds us of Othello, Leontes condemns his newborn child, first to death, then to abandonment, and his wife to prison without pausing to wait for the sentence of the divine oracle. That sentence, when it comes, proves Hermione to have been innocent; but meanwhile she has died, or so Leontes believes, of grief; his son has been lost, and his friendship with Polixenes has been shattered beyond all apparent remedy. The first movement of destruction and disintegration is complete with Leontes's broken confession of guilt: "Apollo's angry; and the heavens themselves,/ Do strike me at my injustice" (3.2.144-45).

It is through a study of the interrelated poetic imagery that the play, The Winter's Tale, can attain a significant dimension. So to pass from Pericles and Cymbeline to The Winter's Tale is to leave the field of experiment for that of a finished achievement. The Winter's Tale, which is more a dramatised romance than a drama, is a superb comedy touched with tragic intensity in which the author has freely strolled amidst the richness of Jacobean imagery and conceit. Leontes and Polixenes, respectively kings of Sicily and Bohemia (here clearly countries of imagination), open the play as life-long friends; but from the moment of their appearance, their friendship verges on rupture. The "affection," as we are told in Camillo's opening remarks, "cannot choose but branch now" (1.1.20-21), and they have shaken "hands, as over a vast; and embraced as it were, from the ends of opposed winds" (1.1.25-27). The threat of tragedy thus veiled in the apparent celebration of their unity soon takes shape in the passionate, jealous conviction of Leontes that Polixenes had replaced him in the affections of his Hermione.

This division, which Shakespeare makes no attempt to render psychologically probable, is not to be clearly explained in terms of mere realism. It is in a very real sense, symbolic, indicative of a possibility universally present in the

7 human make-up, and its nature is made clear in the course of Polixenes's account of the foundations upon which his friendship with Leontes had rested. Polixenes exclaims:

We were, fair Queen, Two lads that thought there was no more behind But such a day tomorrow as today, And to be boy eternal. (1.2.63-66)

He passionately continues to say,

We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i'th' sun, And bleat the one at th' other. What we changed Was innocence for innocence, we knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed That any did. (1.2.69-73) The friendship between the two kings, which dates from childhood, has rested on the youthful tale of innocence; based on a sentimental ignoring of the reality of time, it originally assumed that it was possible to remain "boy eternal." The realities of human nature however, make this impossible. Boyhood is necessarily a state of transition. Time corrupts those unprepared to oppose its action with a corresponding moral effect, and youthful innocence, left to itself, falls fatally under the shadow of "the doctrine of ill-doing." So in Leontes, it is the evil impulse, which comes to the surface, destroying his friendship with Polixenes and leading him to turn upon his saintly wife Hermione with an animal intensity of feeling. He is completely irrational when, in a fit of jealousy, he addresses Pauline after seeing the child born to Hermione:

Out! A mankind witch! Hence with her, out o'door— A most intelligencing bawd. (2.3.67-69)

His sexual passion, in other words, thrusts reason aside, expressing itself in broken phrases and sentences:

My wife is slippery? (1.2.275) It is a bawdy planet, that will strike Where 'tis predominant; and 'tis powerful. (1.2.202-03) I have drunk, and seen the spider... (2.1.47) Like Othello who says for Desdemona "Out, strumpet!" and does not hear her but says, "It is too late," and eventually strangles her to death (5.2.84,92). Leontes, too, refuses to listen to the restraining advice of Camillo who entreats the king to be cured of this diseased opinion. Every advice goes wrong. Thus the first movement of disintegration is complete with Leontes's broken and suspicious mind.

The second movement, although very short, contains the turning point which is, mail these plays, air essential feature of the symbolic structure. It opens (3.2) in a storm which carries on, symbolically speaking, the idea of divine displeasure, and is treated poetically in a manner that recalls Pericles. At the crucial point the Mariner tells Antigonus :

In my conscience, The heavens with that we have in hand are angry, And frown upon's. (3.3.4-6) The evocation of the tempest serves as a background to the idea of birth. When the clown who has witnessed the hurricane describes the drowning of a ship's crew in the angry seas, the shepherd replies., fey showing in his arms, a newly found child—the child, in fact, of Leontes—adding, in words ftat echo a similarly crucial utterance in Pericles: "Thou metst with things dying, I with things new-born" (3.3.104-05). The significance of the discovery, thus placed at the centre of the play, is abundantly clear. The child, born under the shadow of Leontes's wrong passion, has, nonetheless, no share in the responsibility for his sin. Borne in tempest and looking forward to future calm, she connects the tragic past with the restored harmony of the future, and becomes the instrument of reconciliation.

Before this reconciliation can begin to take shape in the third movement, we have, however, to passiwer sixteen years. Leontes's daughter, Perdita meets Florizel and offers him pastoral flowers— daffodfls. violets, primroses, oxlips—thus celebrating the return of spring after the long "winter of... discontent" (RichardIII 1.1.1). Florizel's gesture, in turn, expresses, with at least, equal beauty, a simifar desire to live outside time, to hold up the course of mutability in a way that is ultimately imposafele. When he says to Perdita—

When you do dance, I wish you A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that... (4.4.140-43) his erooteon, though expressed in language and rhythm where the effect of simplicity represents the final perfection of art, is still nostalgic, still an attempt to evade the pressure of mutability, to escape from the problems presented by maturity into a permanent dream of first love. The conclusion is, inevitaMy, the same as that implied in Perdita's speech. The meeting of the lover and the beloved is a signAat spring has been born, indeed, out of winter tragedy. But spring needs still to pass over into the summer which is its fulfillment, otherwise it must, in the very nature of things, wither. In terms of the dramatic action with which we are concerned, the spring-like beauty of this love is not yet mafctre. In order to be so, to take up its place, not rejected but completed, in the full balance of the plaj's conception, it needs to be reinforced by the responsibility, the human concern implied in the deeply spiritual penitence of Leontes. That is why, at this moment of idyllic celebration, Polixenes enters to cast across it the shadow of an aged, impotent anger, taking away his son, threatening Perdita with torture, and falling himself into something very like Leontes's sin.

Enough has been said to show that this great pastoral scene plays a far more important part in the symbolic structure of The Winter's Tale than would appear if we regard it as no more than a splendid piece of decorative make-believe. In pastoral Bohemia, as in primitive Britain, there exists a powerful contrast between court sophistication and simple life. Perdita is especially forthright on this subject. When Polixenes, with his sneering description of her as "Worthy enough a herdsman"

(4.4.423), accuses her of enticing Florizel to debase himself and threatens her with torture, her reply is a frank acceptance of the implied challenge:

The self-same sun that shines upon his court Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike. (4.4.432-34)

Once again, however, Shakespeare's aim is not contrast but integration. When all the characters of the play converge upon Leontes's court for the final classification before "the Queen's picture," a subsidiary place is found for the shepherd and the clown (5.2.157) who, by the very fact of their having discovered and reared Perdita can make their own claim for participation in the complete pattern.

The final resolution, towards which the whole play has been tending, is the work of the fourth and last movement. We return, after a gap of sixteen years, to Leontes, whose courtiers have been urging him to marry again. The bond of wedlock, and its fulfillment in the shape of heirs, is a repeatedly stressed factor in The Winter's Tale. The sanctity of Hermione has been, from the first, closely bound up with reverence for her motherhood.

In the long run, Leontes repents enough. The final expiation of his past error coincides with the concentration of the whole action at his court. Florizel and Perdita, to avoid the displeasure of Polixenes, seek refuge in Leontes's court and thereby all is ready for the final reconciliation. Leontes, in the presence of all the chief actors, is placed by the faithful Paulina before the life-like statue of Hermione, which gradually comes to life by a process which corresponds, in its harmonious majesty, to the definitive birth of a new life out of the long winter of penance and suffering. The statue seems to live; it breathes; it is warm; it tortures Leontes with the revival of past memories. Deluded, as he still believes, into thinking that the statue has the appearance of life, he exclaims:

Make me to think so twenty years together. No settled senses of the world can match The pleasure of that madness. (5.3.71-73) Finally, as though in answer to his prayer, the statue comes to life and Leontes and Hermione, restored to one another after sixteen years of sorrow and separation, once more embrace. Florizel and Perdita kneel like Cordelia and Majuia before them, to receive the blessing which Leontes, now restored to his life, is at last ready to give to his daughter found again; while Polixenes, entering upon this scene of joy and reconciliation, completes it by consenting to her marriage with Florizel. In this way, the children's love heals the divisions introduced by passion into the original friendship of the fathers.

However, the theory of "august serenity" and "spiritual discovery" which reached its climax in the criticism of Dowden (1875), soon generated a sort of reaction in its trail (Dowden 379-80). Lytton Strachey, in his critical study, Shakespeare's Final Period, violently attacked the existing notions about the final phase of Shakespeare's dramatic career. As against serenity, Strachey found signs of

10 boredom and bitterness mingled with flagging interest in life and reality. He refused to accept the special significance of the reconciliation and the sense of fulfillment of the last scenes of these comedies, and stated that they were mere conventional finale of all fairy tales. Moreover, the harsh elements of the drama, like the curses of Caliban, make the general atmosphere far from ethereal. In fact, Strachey performed the vital task of putting a halt to the high spate of corrupt adulation regarding the serene mood of Shakespeare in the final period.

The acts and moods of Prospero, however well-intentioned, are certainly not above question and at least such an attitude is far removed from "august serenity." Strachey seems to be palpably indifferent to the final impression of the last plays. In addition to these, we should point out that the workmanship of these plays should not be tested against the standards of realistic drama. Rather there are different strains of music coming out of varying feelings and tempo, which ultimately integrate into a symphony. This feeling of symphony is the focal point of these plays. Dr. Tillyard's treatment of the final phase of Shakespeare in his Shakespeare s Last Plays has enhanced our understanding of these comedies. He sees in these plays the final phase of the tragic pattern which includes some sort of reconciliation and reconstruction after destruction. Perdita and Florizel are marked by the kind of "elan" that brings forth a new lease of life.

Works Cited:

1. Dowden, Edward Shakespere:A Critical Study of His Mind and Art. London: Rouledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. 2. Leech, Clifford. "The Structure of the Last Plays of Shakespeare." Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958): 19-30. 3. Strachey, Lytton. Shakespeare's Final Period. London: Chatto and Windus, 1906. Tillyard, E. M. W. Shakespeare's Last Plays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958.

Re-reading Shakespeare with special reference to Macbeth

Tirthankar Daspurkayastha

The title of Jan Kott’s famous book, Shakespeare our Contemporary, published in 1964, reflects critical engagement with the question of Shakespeare’s relevance to our troubled times. The author directs his critical energies mainly towards exploration of meanings in Shakespeare that might justify his relevance to a generation of readers still haunted by the memories of the post-war years. The fact that John Elsom chose to raise the question in a more pointed manner in the title of his book Is Shakespeare Still our contemporary? shows the continuous relevance of this quest. Elsom’s book was a carefully edited account of a public seminar held to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kott’s book, where students, critics and common readers freely exchanged opinions on questions like whether Shakespeare should be kept alive or be given a decent burial. Evidently, Bardolatry had become a thing of the past and Shakespeare was subjected no less than any other author to critical scrutiny. As Shakespeare’s greatness as a dramatist has long been established beyond doubt, the critical discussion of our time no longer revolves round the question of his greatness but seeks to study his plays as cultural artifacts shaped, like any other cultural production, by forces that impinged on human affairs and moulded the course of human history. Such interpretations of Shakespeare, with their obvious political underpinnings, did not find favour immediately with the traditionalists, and I do not remember having heard any of our teachers refer to these theories in the early eighties when we were students ourselves and when New Historicism and Cultural Materialism had begun to make their presence felt in the western critical discourse. It is only gradually that initial resistance has been overcome and a materialist interpretation has come to replace the liberal humanist readings of the earlier years. Re-readings of Shakespeare have thus involved interpretations of Shakespeare in terms of the shared experiences of mankind in diverse ages and cultures, and although the circumstances depicted in his plays are different from those obtaining in our societies, they reveal on inspection similarities that may not at once jump to the eye. In trying to understand Shakespeare, an age thus tries to understand itself. Ben Jonson’s famous tribute to Shakespeare that he was not of an age but for all time has thus acquired a meaning that was hardly intended by its author. Traditionally, Jonson’s words were believed to refer to a trans-historical validity of Shakespeare’s portrayal of humanity, while present-day critical emphasis is on his relevance in the context of specificities of particular cultural situations. That Shakespeare embodies meanings that people of all races and cultures of all times can relate to is one of the perennial mysteries of his genius. The critical wrangling over authorial meaning or intention will never cease, as, for example, there can be no means to ascertain whether Shakespeare had indeed wanted Prospero’s island to be located in the new world and Caliban to be viewed as a Carib or a member of a Brazilian tribe. Re- reading is a process of appropriating Shakespeare to the new cultural or social milieu

12 of his readers with an intention to discover meanings more relevant to it. The act is more often than not a political one that subserves a larger agenda to turn Shakespeare into a pretext for critiquing the empire. One is struck by the violence with which the critical pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other. The Tempest-criticism can best illustrate this process, which has resulted in transforming Prospero from a wise man to a tyrannical ruler. A teacher trying to discuss the many shifts in criticism in a class-room is often confronted with the unenviable task of reconciling the irreconcilables. Re-readings, however, can take place as much at the level of criticism as at that of performance. While performance may depend on criticism for proper understanding of a play, it may become in itself a mode of criticism, as every gesture of an actor implies his understanding of the role he is enacting. If a director decides to drop the Porter scene in Macbeth or follow the Quarto 1 rather than the Folio version of King Lear in letting a servant apply a poultice of egg’s yolk (“some flax and whites of eggs”) to Gloucester’s blinded eyes, his decision implies an interpretive stance which a critic may take pages to explain. Now we have mentioned Macbeth and in the following pages my focus will be on this play, the briefest and arguably the most intense among Shakespeare’s tragedies. The history of Macbeth-criticism also has had many twists and turns as the play has lent itself to diverse readings that highlight important questions regarding man’s place in a family, in a state and in the universe at large. Once again it is important to remember that no criticism is possible within an ideological vacuum as each reading or a rereading of a play reveals as much about the reader or the critic (or, for that matter, about the age in which s/he is placed) as about the play itself. One indication of the popularity of Macbeth is its long life on stage. As a fascinating study of a noble mind disintegrating under the impact of evil, this play never fails to succeed on stage. One source of the play’s attraction, undoubtedly, is its delineation of conjugal love as a fatal bond between Macbeth and his wife. The intensity of their love is matched only by the intensity of their ambition and the tragedy of one remains inextricably bound up with that of the other. To interpret the role of Lady Macbeth has been one of the most formidable challenges faced by eminent actresses down the ages. Of all the heroines of Shakespeare she has evoked most contradictory responses and each time an actress is called upon to play her part, she is forced to take a stand and decide whether she should be presented as a woman or a monster. One feels that the way an actress chooses to interpret her role speaks volumes about her own idea of womanhood, which in its turn is shaped by the ideological discourse of that moment. When in 1785, Sara Siddons played this role, she viewed her as a woman of great power, beautiful and ambitious, and succeeded in eliciting praise from Hazlitt precisely on this account: “She is a great bad woman, whom we hate, but whom we fear more than we hate.” This was the image of Lady Macbeth that persisted in people’s mind and no one thought of challenging it until Ellen Terry the exquisitely beautiful actress of Victorian theatre changed it all by presenting Lady Macbeth as a delicate woman deeply in love with her husband. It may be said that Terry was exploiting her own feminine beauty to draw out the essential woman in Lady Macbeth. Be that as it may, this alternative perspective afforded in her acting opened up possibilities of interpreting her character in ever new ways. Thus Lady Macbeth has been presented as a maternal woman, as a

13 neurotic, as a seductress, as a feminist, depending on how the actresses in different countries at different points of time have chosen to interpret her character. One may refer to Judy Dench’s Lady Macbeth which she played opposite McKellen in 1978 to appreciate how the latter-day notion of companionate marriage seemed to shape the actress’s understanding of Lady Macbeth’s role in her husband’s career. Her interpretation departs from the traditional reading of the play that tended to lay the blame for Macbeth’s fall entirely at her door. Judy Dench shows her as sharing in his guilt as well as in his agonies rather than merely using him as a tool for satisfying her personal ambitions. (MacMullen) These are only a few of the instances of how Lady Macbeth has been presented on stage. A play is a verbal artifact that remains open to interpretation by actors in terms of physical action. Judy Dench chose to represent Lady Macbeth as being frightened by her own prayer to be unsexed and Ellen Terry presented her fit following the discovery of Duncan’s murder as real rather than feigned. These are kinds of interpretations for which the text itself could provide no support. In this context one feels that earlier representation of Lady Macbeth as a masculine woman was within an acting tradition that went back to Shakespeare’s own time, when the boy-actors played the role of women. Although women had been performing on public stage regularly since 1660, it evidently took a long time for the older tradition to give place to the new. Despite the fact that our knowledge of Shakespeare is dependent largely, if not wholly, on what the critics have made of him, it must be acknowledged nonetheless that famous actors and actresses have contributed not a little to the popular understanding of the Shakespearean characters . If the character of Lady Macbeth and her relationship with her husband constitute the main focus of feminist criticism of this play, new historicist and cultural materialist readings concern themselves with the dynamics of power- relations between the individual and the state that this play unravels. Alan Sinfield’s famous essay on Macbeth views the play as an expression of the dramatist’s anxiety about the legitimization of violence in an absolutist regime. One feels that the recent production of Macbeth in Bengali by a theatrical troupe led by Mr. Kaushik Sen follows a somewhat similar line of interpretation in projecting the play’s denouement as being part of a never-ending cycle of violence. As Malcolm succeeds Macbeth to the Scottish throne, his face “contorts into a vicious visage” (Lal) and the murderers employed by Macbeth become his men. Before concluding, I would like to refer to two important Indian productions of Macbeth, which to my mind typify the Indian response to Shakespeare. In B.V. Karanth’s Barnam Vana and Ekbal Ahmed’’s Gombe Macbeth we have adaptations of the Shakespearean tragedy in terms of Indian folk theatre, with Karanth writing within the conventions of Yakshagana theatre of Karnataka and Ekbal using Gombe or puppets to convey the play’s meaning. The choice of the theatrical medium in either case is far from being fortuitous. As emphasis shifts from the delineation of character to a study of the power of ambition over human minds, Macbeth is seen in both the productions as a mere plaything in the hands of powers stronger than himself. Barnam Vana is the Kannad translation of Birnam wood. By making this forest which is referred to only towards the end of Shakespeare’s play the main emblem of his version of Macbeth’s story, Karanth highlights the role of ambition which he visualizes as a ‘labyrinthine jungle… which ensnares and destroys man’. (Qtd: Panja 106). Ekbal’s Gombe

Macbeth was meant for school children, whom he wanted to instruct through this play in the frightful power of greed (Chandrashekar: 174). In his Macbeth the Witches are the only human beings and all other characters mere puppets. The interpretation of Shakespeare’s play in either case clearly appears to have been strongly coloured by a fatalistic vision of life which leaves little room for the operation of free will. The term Yakshagana which is a combination of yaksha, a demon and gana a song implies a religious world view made manifest in action involving both human and supernatural beings. In Karanth’s play Witches wear Chhau masks and cloaks decorated with painted leaves (Panja: 106) and thus blend easily into the greenery of the mysterious forest. The representation of life as an intricate wood and that of the human protagonists as mere puppets in the hands of Fate are at best reductive versions of a profound Shakespearean tragedy.

Works Cited 1. Chandrashekar, Laxmi. “A sea change into something rich and strange”: Ekbal Ahmed’s Macbeth and Hamlet” India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance. Ed. Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz. New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2006. Print. 2. Lal, Ananda. “In a time of tyranny and love.” Telegraph 27 Oct 2012. Print. 3. MacMullen, Taralyn Adele. The Role of Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, A Thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College , May 2005. Web. 25.08.12http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04132005 093708/unrestricted/MacMullen_thesis.pdf/ 4. Panja, Shormistha. “Not Black and White but Shades of Grey: Shakespeare in India.” Shakespeare Without English. Ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Chee Seng Lim. New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley,2006. Print.

5. Sinfield, Alan. “ Macbeth: History, Ideology and Intellectuals” New Historicism and Renaissance Drama Ed. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton. London: Longman, 1992. 167-180.Print.

‘… more perjured eye’ : the Paradox of vision in the Dark Lady Sonnets

Satiprasad Maity

As one reads the sonnets 127-154 which make up the group known as the Dark Lady sonnets, one cannot help being struck by the repeated use of the words ‘eye/s’, ‘looking’, ‘see’, ‘behold’, ‘sight’, ‘glance’ and other related words denoting vision.

In sonnet 127, the poet says that his mistress’s eyes are raven-black and in their blackness (they) seem to be lamenting people born ugly but making themselves beautiful and giving beauty a bad name by counterfeiting it. Sonnet 130 one of the most anthologized sonnets by Shakespeare, begins with the line: ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;’. In line 6 of the same sonnet, the poet says: ‘But no such roses see I in her cheeks;’. In sonnet 131, the poet calls his mistress as much of a tyrant as those women whose beauty makes them proud and cruel and goes on to a say that to his ‘doting heart’ she is ‘the fairest and most precious jewel’. The poet begins sonnet 132 by saying, ‘Thine eyes I love’, the eyes seem to the poet to pity him, knowing that he is tormented by her scorn. In their blackness, the eyes look like mourners at a funeral, gazing compassionately at the poet’s pain. Then hyperbolically, the poet says that the mistress’s mourning eyes surpass in beauty the morning sun in the gray eastern sky or the evening star in the western twilight: ‘And truly, not the morning sun of heav’n /Better becomes the gray cheeks of the east./ Nor that full star that ushers in the ev’n/Doth half that glory to the sober west,/As those two mourning eyes become thy face.’ (11.5-8) In sonnet 133, the poet charges his mistress with having ensnared not only him with her cruel, seductive attractions, but also his ‘sweet’st friend’. The poet is no longer his own man, enslaved as he is by his mistress’s fatal charms. He has been, he rues bitterly, abandoned by his friend lured away by his femme fatale; by himself, and by the lady. This, to him, is a triple torment multiplied by three. And yet the poet cannot wean himself away from her charms and would fain be her prisoner, besotted as he is with irresistible passion.

The idea that comes through powerfully in sonnet 137 is that vision corrupted by lust and irrational passion can mislead and distort, so that the victim of passion sees and yet does not see. In this sonnet, the poet bewails his state of utter confusion in which both his eyes and heart have conspired to make him

16 miserable. A bitter sense of anguished helplessness is articulated from the very beginning of the sonnet:

Thou blind fool love, what dost thou to my eyes

That they behold, and see not what they see?

The word ‘blind’ in the opening line indicates the foolishness of the poet’s passion-misled love which the poet personifies as a ‘fool’. The poet’s eyes prevent him from accurately seeing reality. His eyes know what beauty is and see who has it, yet they decide that the worst is the best. The poet knows about the lady’s sexual promiscuity. His vision has been distorted because he looks at her with his judgment warped by infatuation. It is this infatuation which uses his misperceptions about his mistress as a decoy for trapping him. Why should his eyes overlook her sexual escapades, putting ‘fair truth upon so foul a face’, he asks. Then in the couplet, the poet admits to both his heart and eyes being completely mistaken about the truth and their loving this inconstant, treacherous woman.

In things true my heart and eyes have erred,

And to this false plague are they now transferred.

In sonnet 139, the poet implores the woman ‘not to ‘wound me with thine eye, but with thy tongue;’ and

Tell me thou lov’st elsewhere; but in my sight,

Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside.

Then the doting poet invents the excuse in the woman’s defence that she knows only too well that her looks can kill him, so, she averts her gaze from him to direct it at his enemies instead. Then in the couplet, the poet pleads rather ingeniously that since he is dead already, she should ‘kill me outright with looks, and rid my pain.’

The same idea of the paradox of vision of outward sight infected and impaired by reckless passion leading to falsifying inward blindness – comes across more poignantly in sonnet 148. Utterly desperate, the infatuated poet wonders what eyes love has put in his head ‘which have no correspondence with true sight’! Or if his eyes do see accurately, he wonders what has happened to his judgment to wrongly criticize what they see. If the woman he loves is beautiful,

17 why does the rest of the world think her ugly? The poet then tries to console himself by saying that ‘Love’s eye is not so true as all men’s no, /How can it?’ A lover’s eye, the poet contends, becomes dysfunctional when it is so distressed by staying awake and crying small wonder then that the poet is wrong about what he sees, for the sun itself does not see anything until the sky is clear. Then comes the clinching couplet at the end:

O curing love! With tears thou keep’st me blind,

Lest eyes well seeing thy foul faults should find.

The poet’s love for the woman is blind, because his eyes do not see her flaws- her cruel way-wardness, her inconstancy, her lies, her lustfulness and her other lapses. In sonnet 152, it is this inward blindness that has made him swear false oaths (‘I am perjured most’, l. 6) about the woman’s faithfulness, love and constancy. And to make her look better, the poet has blinded himself, swearing to the opposite of what he actually saw. For he has sworn that the woman is beautiful; his eye is doubly a liar, telling such an outrageous lie after swearing to tell the truth. Here again outward vision contaminated by passion becomes a distortion of vision distancing the poet from truth:

For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,

Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy,

And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,

Or made them swear against the thing they see.

For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye,

To swear against the truth. So, foul a lie.

[Italics mine]

From the Metaphysicals to the Neoclassicists: The Changing notion of Wit in the Seventeenth Century Poetry

Satyaki Pal

The early editions of Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury' published during the second half of the nineteenth century did not contain a single poem by Donne. The subsequent editions have also avoided including any poems by Donne. Donne and the Metaphysicals had withered away from British canonical literature after 1660 thanks to the neo-classical critics' onslaughts especially against the nature of wit in metaphysical poetry. It was T. S. Eliot who revived our interest in the Metaphysical poets when he drew our attention to the unique nature of Donne's poetry which, according to him, was unified sensibility, and which he thought could be an appropriate mode of expression for modernist sensibility. His theory of 'objective correlative' proposed in his essay 'Hamlet and his Problems' is not alien to the nature of Metaphysical conceit at least in spirit. Eliot argued that Donne could feel his thoughts. In other words, he could express his emotions on the plane of intellect. In 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', for example, the union of lovers, in their physical absence, is compared to two legs of a compass. This is what is celebrated as brain-work in Donne’s poetry, and what is defined as conceit or wit by critics like Helen Gardner. In her introduction to the edition 'The Metaphysical Poets' she describes this comparison as one of the finest examples of conceit where the readers are forced to concede the likeness between the lovers and two legs of a compass while being strongly aware of their unlikeness. But this very nature of wit in the metaphysical poets was rejected and even ridiculed by the neo-classicists like Dryden, Pope and Johnson. Dryden felt that Donne affected metaphysics and ‘perplexed the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy’. Pope described Metaphysical wit in his 'An Essay on Criticism' as ‘one vile antithesis’; while Johnson in his 'The Lives of Poets' derogatively stated that the early 17th century English poets may (my italics) be called metaphysical. These negative criticisms were enough to drive out Donne and his company from major British poetry editions for almost three hundred years. This hostile criticism had a lot to do with the change in the attitude to wit after 1660. Indeed the concept of wit underwent drastic change owing to the influence of New Science. The prevailing climate was unfavourable to poetry. Science came to be accepted as the best form of knowledge, and its systems began to influence other systems of knowledge. The various discoveries in the scientific field, especially in the field of astronomy, by Galileo, Copernicus and Newton in the last two centuries preceding the eighteenth, encouraged confidence in the potentiality of the human mind and in the power of scientific methods. Simultaneously, in philosophy, the medieval scholastic and deductive methods were gradually being

19 dismantled and replaced by empirical and inductive methods in the works of Bacon, Hobbes and Locke. Experiment and observation became the corner-stone of enquiry and mere hypothesis on the basis deductions was rejected. For example, Marvell's most well-known poem 'To His Coy Mistress' has three stanzas, the first two being premises in a syllogistic argument in the deductive method and the final stanza, the conclusion on the basis of the premises. The last three lines of Donne's 'The Good Morrow' are similarly structured involving a movement from the major premise to the minor, to the conclusion. But after 1660 this scholastic method of argument became completely dated. The establishment of the Royal Society of England in 1660, its members being not only men of science like Newton but also poets like Dryden, only confirm the recognition of scientific thinking as the ideal method of enquiry into knowledge. Pope paid tribute to this emergence of New Science in his famous opening couplet on Newton in 'Epigraph Intended for Newton' :

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said 'let Newton be!' and all was light

But such was the intellectual opinion against fancy and imagination in this age that Newton described poetry as a kind of ingenious nonsense. Locke described poetry as pleasant cheat that moved the passion and thus misled our judgement. Locke went on to make a distinction between wit and judgement. Wit, for Locke, meant a certain quickness of parts whereby the contents of memory, the storehouse of impressions, were easily available. Wit, according to him, did not necessarily facilitate judgement; rather it facilitated pleasant pictures. Judgement, on the other hand, sharpened the mind’s ability to distinguish between one idea and another so that one was not misled by similitude. Thus metaphysical wit, it was argued, thrived on memory and imagination, but judgement on reason. Earlier Hobbes step by step argued how time and education gave experience; experience was stored in memory; memory helped fancy and judgement. In his opinion fancy facilitated ornaments of a poem; whereas judgement gave strength and structure. In 'Leviathan' Hobbes described fancy as a faculty which found likeness in things unlike, whereas judgement enabled one to find differences in things apparently similar. So Hobbes had felt judgement need to check fancy from going awry. What was fancy to Hobbes was wit to Locke, but both fancy and wit were inimical to reason. Contemporaries of Dryden and Pope, encouraged by these empirical ideas, were driving a wedge between wit and judgement. Sir william D'avenant in his 'Essay on Poetry' said all that was useful in human civilisation was owing to science; all that were pleasant, because of poetry. New Science had thus relegated poetry to the margin in the Augustan age and the role of the poets had become secondary. Much of this dismissive contempt for poetry was no doubt owing to the excessive metaphysical strain in some later seventeenth century poets. The lyricism and witty conceit of Donne and Marvell had degenerated into pointless juxtaposition of disparate ideas which made the images more ornamental and less functional, what came to be called 'Clevelandising' after John Cleveland. Pope mocks at this tendency in 'An Essay on Criticism 'when he wrote - Some to conceit alone their taste confine, And glittering thoughts struck out at every line;

Pleased with a work where nothing is just or fit; One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit (Ll. 289-293) It is in this context that the neoclassicists like Dryden and Pope were redefining the wit and trying to retrieve poetry from the margin. In his 'An Essay on Criticism' Pope used the term wit 47 times and in 7 different meanings. He distinguished between true wit and false wit and described true wit as propriety, perspicuity and integrity. Like Hobbes he reunited wit with judgement. In 'An Essay on Criticism' he wrote:

For wit and judgement often are at strife Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife (Ll.82-83)

Wit, he argued, therefore must be tempered by judgement :

'Tis more to guide than spur the Muse's steed; Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed (Ll. 84-85)

Having allied wit with judgement, Pope then went on to ally wit with Nature. In his 'An Essay on Criticism' he defined wit thus :

True wit is Nature to advantaged dressed; What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed (Ll. 297-298) A true wit was a poet of Nature. He must follow Nature. Pope's advice to the budding poets was - First follow Nature, and your judgement frame By her just standards which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged,and universal light (Ll. 68-71)

Pope had a definite aim in joining wit with Nature and bringing Nature into the domain of poetry. In 'Windsor Forest' he defined Nature thus:

Where order in variety we see, And where, though all things differ, all agree. (Ll.15-16)

Nature for the neoclassicists meant order and universal laws. Nature was what the New Science was exploring, discovering and explaining. By allying poetry with Nature, Pope was once again trying to make poetry a serious pursuit in an age of science. So the neoclassicists turned their attention from the ‘metaphysical’ to the ‘physical’ world around them. Locke, in his 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding' had observed that the business was not to know all things, but to know man's conduct, and Pope fell in line with this argument in his 'Essay on Man':

Know then thyself, presume not god to scan, The proper study of mankind is man. (Ll.1-2)

The poet-wit was no longer an entertainer but a social reformer, a crusader, employing the tools of satire to bring order in society by criticising all kinds of social evils. So we have political satire in 'Absalom and Achitophel', social satire against fops and flirts in 'The Rape of the Lock' or satire against grub-street literature and culture in 'MacFlecknoe' and 'The Dunciad'. The neoclassicists had thus made poetry useful like the discoveries in science. But if there was order in Nature, and if the poet had taken up the task of enforcing that order in society by using the cudgel of satire, a true wit must first enforce that order in poetry. He must be a conscious artist conforming to the rules of poetry. Just as nature imparted beauty, order and harmony to the physical world, the poet-wit must find the correct modes of expression ('what oft was thought but ne'er so well-expressed') in structure and versification so that his fancy did not run amuck. He must use his judgement to use the proper form for his subject. In 'The Rape of the Lock', for example, the mock-heroic structure is a brilliant piece of wit to show by contrast how his characters are most unsuitable for heroic treatment. The solemnity of the style acts as a foil to the triviality of the subject matter. The use of airy sylphs for the supernatural machinery is another piece of brilliant wit. These airy beings, invisible as they are, are ironically meant to protect the honour of the coquettes – honour which is as non-existent as the sylphs are invisible. Besides, the moral muddle in the society is adequately emoted in the language, in the use of bathos and zeugma. For example, in such lines as 'puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux' or 'lose her heart or necklace at a ball' the deliberate disorder in the language is meant to suggest the moral disorder of the times. This effective application of a form most commensurate with the subject matter suggests a fine organization at work, an organisation already existing in Nature, devised by god and serving as a perfect model for the poets. In fact, if there was one idea which the scientists and empiricists hesitated to defy – it was the existence of god. God was being explained as the Prime Mover, the Great Revealer. Hobbes, in his 'Leviathan', observed that there was one first mover, a first and eternal cause of all things, which man called god. In his 'Reasonableness of Christianity' Locke accepted that the works of Nature, in every part of them, sufficiently evidenced a Deity. Newton’s great machine could not function without a mechanic. In trying to recreate order, harmony and beauty in poetry by imitating Nature, neoclassicists like Dryden and Pope were trying to suggest that god was the greatest wit, the perfect artist, and the human poet, a miniature artist, creating a second nature in imitation of the first – the Divine Nature – which even New Science could not ignore. In his 'Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II', Pope wrote :

Yes I am proud; I am proud to see Men not afraid of God, afraid of me: Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne, Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone. (Ll. 208-211)

The neoclassical poet was no longer an entertainer, a pleasing cheat, but a social reformer with a bardic mission, playing a more important role than a judge or a priest or even the king. He was indeed god-like. Was Pope challenging omnipotent power of god god? Did he suggest that in the Augustan milieu a poet was more

22 relevant than god? We must not forget that Pope was a devout Catholic. So it seems he was merely pointing out that new science or empiricism could not wish away the true-wit poet just as they could not deny the existence of god. Neoclassicists like Dryden and Pope were once again bringing back poetry to the centrestage by redefining the meaning of wit to include judgement and nature within its fold.

Works Cited 1. Grierson, Herbert J. C. Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, Oxford: Clarendon Pres.1921 .Print. 2. Gardner, Helen. The Metephysical Poets (ed.). London: Penguin Books. 1985.Print. 3. Gardner, Helen. John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays (ed.). New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Print. 4. Dobree, Bonamy. Restoration Comedy 1660-1770. London: Oxford University P, 2003 (Paperback). Print. 5. Eliot, T.S. ‘The Metaphysical Poets’. English Critical Texts: 16th to 20th Century. Ed. D.J.Enright and Chickera. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Print.

The Problematics of Gender Identity in the Early Poetry of T. S. Eliot

Indranil Acharya

All the poets pivotal in evolving the sonorous erotic lyricism of the nineteenth century against which the modernists sharply reacted - Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, the pre – Raphaelites – were held responsible for feminizing poetry, often in those poems about women that define the features of poetic vision and style. In this way the portrait of a lady in nineteenth century poetry implies a debate about the gender of the poetical1. In a similar fashion, the modern portrait of a lady concerns the relationship of gender to poetic speech and figure. I propose to concentrate on T. S. Eliot, for his treatment of the feminine subject reveals much about the evolution of his poetic identity. Eliot's early poetry is a veritable gallery of female personae. In many ways, their predominance is quite natural and expected. The poetic tradition with which he matured, the strain of Romanticism that evolves through Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, is built upon the lyric evocation of female subjects, and even a cursory glance at Eliot' s early uncollected work demonstrates mighty echoes of those voices. These lines from The Portrait, for example, remind us of Rossetti's numerous sonnets on female portraiture:

Not like a tranquil goddess carved of stone But evanescent, as if one should meet. A pensive lamia in some wood - retreat, An immaterial fancy of one's own . No meditations glad or ominous Disturb her lips, or move the slender hands; Her dark eyes keep their secrets hid from us, Beyond the circle of our thoughts she stands. (Poems Written in Early Youth 27) Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have shown echoes of A. C. Swinburne's Lesbia Brandon in The Love Song of Saint Sebastian (Gilbert and Gubar 30-31), and Circe Palace also echoes Swinburne. They argue that the former poem appears to be completely under the sado - masochistic influence of Swinburne in its projection of the conflict between the sexes, and it is rather astonishing for them because Eliot was a classical, royalist, Anglican Nobel prize winner- producing such orthodox texts as Ash Wednesday and Murder in the Cathedral. The poem, according to them, simply dramatizes the most "brutal" implications of sexual animosities that are also firmly etched in other texts by Eliot. Promising lethal loyalty to his mistress, the self - flagellating speaker of St. Sebastian clearly implicates desire with annihilation, sex with violence, for he pledges first to whip himself in order to show his erotic passion and then to asphyxiate and disfigure his sweetheart so that she will no longer be beautiful to anyone but him. In this respect the speaker of Eliot's poem resembles one enamoured persona from Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon (written

24 c.1864-70; published 1952). I quote a passage from that novel to demonstrate the similarity in their psychological states: Deeply he desired to die by her, if that could be; and more deeply, if this could be, to destroy her; scourge her with swooning and absorb the blood with kisses; caress and lacerate her loveliness, alleviate and heighten her pains; to feel her foot upon his throat, and wound her OWN with his teeth; submit his body and soul for a little to her lightest will, and satiate upon hers the desperate caprice of his immeasurable desire; to inflict careful fortune on limbs too tender to embrace, suck the tears off her laden eyelids, bite through her sweet and shuddering lips. (225)

Now, notwithstanding the Swinburnean overtones, St. Sebastian reveals a consciousness of sex battle that pervades much of Eliot's work because many other texts written in the same period clearly relate such conflict to the demands of the New Woman. Petit Epitre, a Laforguian verse in French from the same manuscript in which St. Sebastian appears, mockingly adopts a standpoint against vote for women. Cousin Nancy (1917) openly ridicules the hollow modernity of the emancipated Miss Nancy Ellicott, who not only "smoked / And danced all the modern dances" but also, as if to demolish the earth itself, "Strode across the hills and broke them.” (Collected Poems 1909- 1962, 32). Even the poem's allusive ending covertly criticizes this aggressive protoflapper:

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable law. (Poems Written in Early Youth 32)

In the opinion of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar Eliot's presentation of Matthew (Arnold) and Waldo (Emerson) as fragile 'guardians of faith' is undoubtedly ironical. But, at the same time, their identification with the 'army of unalterable law' indicates Eliot's condemnation of rebellious Nancy whose breaking of nature (the hills) also threatens to break the grounds of culture (Gilbert and Gubar 32). The innate distrust that Eliot nurtures against the New Woman becomes quite obvious once again.

Thus, when Eliot composes Portrait of a Lady or The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock he is recasting a nineteenth - century mode of portraiture one finds in his early poetry. Apart from the impact of this "feminized" poetic tradition, Eliot was influenced by what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe as a gradually feminized literary culture, in which women writers, editors and patrons played pivotal roles (125-162). The formation of the poet's identity was significantly inspired by these two factors. He celebrated Christina Rossetti, Marianne Moore, and Djuna Barnes. But although compliments formulated by this literary man were true, they were sometimes problematic. And this is quite in keeping with the problematic identity of the poet. He never wants to pigeonhole his assertions. It gives rise to ambiguity and complexity. Eliot enjoyed this camouflage. For instance, his “final, and magnificent compliment" to Marianne Moore's poetry is that it "is as 'feminine' as Christina Rossetti’s.” (qtd. in Bonnie Costello 28)

Finally, the mightiest impact on Eliot 's manifestation of his identity as a poet was probably that of his mother, who was a poet herself and, who told her son that she hoped he would succeed in the literary pursuit at which she had not been able to achieve any moderate success (The Letters of T.S. Eliot 13). Thus, in respect of literary tradition, literary culture, and personal biography, Eliot would define his identity in the context of a mighty female presence.

Eliot's early poetry is predominantly engaged with the hassles of defining a voice in the context of this powerful female presence. Portrait of a Lady represents the case most overtly. The poem is a battlefield of voices, a juxtaposition launched to determine who - or whose music - should “have the advantage, after all". Eliot orders the poem's three parts by pairing the voices of the Lady and the speaker. The speaker first describes the Lady's arrangements - the way she decorates her chamber, the accents of her voice - and then quests for a voice and figuration of his own to separate himself from her. The female presence here goads him to assert his independent identity in order to overcome his anxiety of being overshadowed by her. The major metaphor in this dual of voices is music. The Lady speaks through "attenuated tones of violins / Mingled with remote cornets", violins the speaker hears as shattered and jarring as he desperately tries to construct a prelude of his own, “capricious monotone".

The idiom in which the Lady introduces herself is a maudlin one that relies upon the stock figuration of a poetic sensibility - lilacs and hyacinths, gray and smoky afternoons, evenings that are yellow and rose. She recreates the plot of an Arnoldian romance –friendship that offers a person secure value in a hostile world (as the speaker of Dover Beach says, "Ah love, let us be true to one another”), hands that extend across a gulf, missed proximities. Apart from this harmony in imagery and theme with a conventional nineteenth century idiom, the parts of this poem that the Lady puts in a sequence have the unity of atmosphere, setting, and dramatic situation that mark the Victorian lyric. The Lady wants to shape a poem in the tradition of Two in the Campagna, ToMarguerite: Continued, or Amours de Voyage.

However, the conflict deepens when the speaker introjects "false notes" into the Lady’s sentimental lyric. It is definitely a desperate attempt on his part to assert the “tom - tom” of his own poetic identity. He strives for a metropolitan, masculine vocabulary - tobacco, bocks, the comics and the sporting page, the late events, the public clocks. He exploits the irony and the incongruous juxtaposition that characterize him as a modern man:

Particularly I remark An English countess goes upon the stage A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance, Another bank defaulter has confessed (Collected Poems 20)

Such an employment of irony and disjunction, for all its covert recognition of some of the psychological factors of the poem, sustains the speaker's sense of poetic hegemony:

I keep my countenance, I remain self - possessed. . . (20)

But this is a domination, as Hugh Kenner says of Laforgue, whose virtuosity is “the debonair panic of a man whose strategy. . . is to hasten across abysses he has no taste for exploring." (qtd. in Kenner 21)

This Laforguian strategy helped Eliot not to be committed to any serious and self - sufficient magniloquence like the late Elizabethan dramatists. Rather, it offered him an excellent opportunity for indulging in parody. He also allows the speaker to be dominated and circumscribed by his own image of himself, "since no one goes back alive out of this gulf, without fear I expose my heart to you" .2 Furthermore, this narcissistic portrayal of the speaker is often a defence mechanism against the stupendous impact of the Lady. The assertion of identity is of paramount concern for the speaker even if it implies any adoption of devious or perverse means. In this way, the speaker exhibits a mounting anxiety in his quest for poetic figures to hold his own identity, as he borrows “every changing shape to find expression" (Collected Poems 22). The speaker finally strives to bring down his anxiety by imagining the death of the lady, both in its epigraph and in the atmosphere of Juliet's tomb created in its introductory lines. The poem thus arrives at the conclusion of its duel of voices, a duel it concedes to the Lady. By her demise she attains a certain edge of realized expression - “This music is successful with a 'dying fall' " – that the speaker is far from attaining ever. Even at the end he is “Doubtful, for a while/Not knowing what to feel or if I understand /Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon . . ." (CP 22). However, the speaker has achieved some kind of triumph in the long run. By imagining her death, he formulates her within the limits of the portrait he has created and thus cuts down to manageable limits the discomfort she causes him. She thus becomes a part of the portrait gallery of buried literary ladies of the nineteenth century - Edgar Allan Poe's The Oval Portrait, Tennyson's Gardener's Daughter, Browning's My Last Duchess (Carol Christ 26). These nineteenth century portraits often equate the death of their subject with the appropriation of a literary type identified as feminine. In the case of Eliot's poem, the device of the portrait not only offers a chance to the speaker to aestheticize and therefore distance an uneasy relationship, it also enables Eliot to identify a fantasy of desertion and murder with issues of literary style. He, thus, devises a drama whereby he detaches himself from a feminized poetic idiom. At the same time, he appropriates its effects through the ventriloquized voice of the Lady. Eliot imagines the literary past as a woman, whom he deserts, dishonours, even assassinates while he appropriates her voice. Indeed, Eliot's poetry provides occasion for questioning Harold Bloom's paradigm of poetic influence, because, at least in his poetry, Eliot is prone to project safely faraway voices of the literary tradition, with whom he wishes unabashedly to identify himself, as male, whereas he associates poetic props of the nineteenth century, far closer to his poetic idiom, with a woman whom the poem in some fashion engages in a drama of desertion and appropriation. He thus prefers to imagine his relationship to the immediate literary past not as an Oedipal struggle but as a desertion or a rape. Eliot's gendering of this drama of betrayal - a gendering already implied in the feminization of the poetic idiom in the nineteenth century - gives him an opportunity to enact and mask issues of poetic influence simultaneously.3 It also captures the process through which Eliot is gradually evolving his poetic credentials, his independent identity.

Even when the woman is more ideally constructed than the woman in Portrait of a Lady Eliot connects her portrayal with identical issues of desertion and literary style. Another

27 portrait poem in the Prufrock volume, for instance, La Figlia che Piange, also connects its female subject with a nineteenth - century style, in this example, Victorian sentimental narrative painting, which covertly suggests a domestic drama in the attitudinizing of its subject. Just like Portrait of a Lady, the poem acts out a fantasy of desertion, whose reward, as it were, is an image that becomes the funerary monument to which the poem's title refers. By constructing his portrait of a lady, the lover/ poet at once appropriates "a gesture and a pose" while he ensures his distancing from a woman whose real presence threatens to overshadow him (Ronald Bush 11-14). Confronted with the image of the girl in his daydream, the dandified speaker responds with a Prufrock – like doubleness. Threatened by his desires he recoils into the irony of a self - consciously oblique phrase: "Fling them to the ground and turn/With a fugitive resentment in your eyes . . ." (CP 36). But the needs of his emotional life cannot be suppressed for long. In the midst of his ironic detachment, we feel the might of an obsession. It becomes apparent in the use of four emphatic monosyllables:

Stand on the highest pavement. . ./ Lean on a garden urn…/ Clasp your flowers to you… Fling them to the ground . . . (CP 36)

The force behind these imperatives suggests how much psychic energy Eliot's speaker must spend to resist the girl's image from becoming vivid and uncomfortable. However, despite his best efforts, his attempts prove futile. In the last line of the first stanza an insurgent explosion of lyricism disencumbers the girl's image, and all but erases the dandy’s emotional detachment: “Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair . . .". After a few lines we find the dandy by comparing the lover's desertion of his beloved to the mind's desertion of an exploited body. It suggests that at some level, man and girl, lover and beloved, are projections of his own psyche, and that "la figlia", the young girl, is an image of his own emotional life. It is not surprising that the similes are sympathetically weighed toward the body. Ronald Bush argues that though one part of the speaker's psyche displays a New England sensibility, the dandy's strongest identification is with the buried emotional life suggested by the heart, the body and the girl. He has been delinked from his vital centre by an acquired self, and the split seems like the separation of death. Like Prufrock, he is suspended between two identities, unable to enjoy either. In this way, in their encounters with gender issue the speakers of Eliot’s early poems display ghostly identities. According to Bush, Eliot, of course, unlike the dandy he constructed, could name his demons by writing poetry. But at this stage of his career he was no more able to dispel a constant feeling of emotional alienation than was his surrogate. Poetry integrated his life only for a moment.

In this way, Eliot's speaker - both in this poem and Portrait of a Lady - has a discomforting resemblance to that nineteenth century commissioner of portraits, Browning's Duke. He alters himself from one who is the object of a discomforting female look to one who completely controls the gaze, who “puts by the curtain". By carefully constructing an image, he saves himself from decomposure.

The prose poem Hysteria makes explicit the relation between the construction of a physically unspoiled image and the mental poise of the male subject. The poem narrates a fantasy of being swallowed up in “the dark caverns” of a woman's throat, a fantasy that the title locates as hysteria. The speaker's hysteria begins to mount when he becomes appropriated by the woman's voice: "As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and

28 being part of it. . .". He loses a sense of the visual integrity of her image, representing body parts by grotesquely anthropomorphized metaphors: "[H]er teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad - drill". (CP 34) He diverts himself from this fantasy of drowning / engulfment only by concentrating on a visually separate male image, the aged waiter, who “with trembling hands was HURRIEDLY spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table" (CP 34). These trembling hands - for Eliot often the last determining object of human identity in moments of dehumanization and fragmentation - perform the one act in the poem described with distinct boundaries and visual precision: the spreading of a pink and white checked cloth on a rusty green iron table. The ordering of the two adjectival phrases - “pink and white checked", "rusty green iron" - suggests that they function to arrest/ restrict attention in visually discrete images that conceal the speaker's hysteria, much as they cover the table. The speaker then decides that if he can offer clearer outlines to the female image by transfixing the shaking of the woman's breasts, he can gather the fragments of the afternoon, and he focuses his attention “with careful subtlety to this end".

In this way Hysteria suggests the function of the stilled and limited / pigeonholed images of Portrait and Figlia. They save the speaker from being swallowed up by the woman - an engulfment that Eliot links with absorption in her voice or her music - and grant him a sense of security in withholding his own voice. But this security is enjoyed at a certain cost. Eliot associates the meticulously constructed whole woman of his poetry with a stiflingly genteel feminine society. The poems in which they are cast also possess the closest affinity in Eliot's work to a nineteenth century poetic idiom and structure, one he identifies as feminine. Eliot manipulates his images of women by residing within these poetic and social boundaries, but he delineates those confines as not granting him an authentic identity. The strategy of possession and vilification is quite in keeping with the Bloomian paradigm of poetic influence.

In an essay on Pound's attitudes toward the visual arts in the Cantos, Michael Bernstein argues that Pound associated female sexuality with unrestricted art, ungraspable imaginative dispersal that was antithetical to his rigid and bounded line. (Bernstein 347-364) Pound's own portrait of a lady, Portrait d'une Femme, fully justifies Bernstein's thesis for the Sargasso Sea of the lady's mind, her sea - hoard of deciduous things, represents an identity without a centre, a collage of detail without a defining principal, a sensibility without confines, which is a negative image of Pound's poetic ideal. For Eliot, too, the confined nature of the female image is crucial to the evolution of his poetic idiom, but he handles the issue in a manner radically different from that of Pound. Eliot associates the bounded line with a feminized poetic idiom from which he desires to distance himself, whereas he identifies his strongest and most characteristic poetic voice through the imaginative dispersal of the female body.

In Women in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot Tony Pinkney argues that Sweeney's lines, "Any man has to, needs to, wants to / once in a lifetime, do a girl in", define the pivotal impetus of Eliot's poetry. (18) According to Pinkney, Sweeney's claim may be turned back upon the poetry itself, for it will come to pass that any Eliotic text has to, needs to, wants to, in one way or another, do a girl in. If it fails to achieve that goal, it is itself murderously threatened by the girl. In this context, Hysteria is an emblematic text in Eliot oeuvre. Pinkney says

29 that there is a possibility of our concurring with the view of A. D. Moody who opines that the speaker is reduced to a state of nerves by her sexuality, or rather by his own fantasy to a voracious and cannibalistic vagina. Yet Pinkney argues, the speaker's fears of fragmentation and loss of independent identity belong more to the fundamental disorders of psychosis than they do to such comparatively manageable neuroses as hysteria.

However, Carol Christ (29) offers a different interpretation. She considers Pinkney's insight to be only partially true. In her opinion, among the most salient characteristics of Eliot's poetry is the way in which it fragments not just female bodies but all bodies, and often in a manner that makes their gender ambiguous and problematic. She is rather inclined to suggest that the issue of corporeal intactness rather than aggression toward women dominates Eliot's poetry. The two issues are, of course, interrelated. If one were seeking to articulate a motivating psychology for Eliot's poetry, one might argue that problem in distancing himself from woman leads to various efforts to do her in. But, Carol Christ thinks, such a misogynistic interpretation would be at the expense of simplifying both the violence of his poetry and the ambiguity in its representation of gender. The murderous impulse toward the woman in Eliot is ever associated with a concern with the intactness of the body, and violent fantasies of physical dismemberment shift quite fluidly between the sexes, as in The Love Song of Saint Sebastian, where Eliot follows a fantasy of flogging himself to death with one of dismembering the woman to whom the poem is addressed. Eliot's preoccupation with physical intactness is in turn intimately linked with his of poetic voice and identity. When Eliot creates an intact image of a woman's body, as he does in the portrait poems, he represents the male as having difficulty finding his own voice, as we can see in the changing figures of Portrait of a Lady or the divided persona of La Figha che Piange. He tends to construct such poems as an ironic dialogue with a nineteenth - century idiom that he simultaneously subverts and appropriates. In the process, however, he is unable to define his own voice with any certainty. In contrast, he identifies his strongest voice not only by dismembering the body but by making ambiguous its identification with both character and gender.4 He places at the centre of such poems a moment of vision that is postponed, evaded, or concealed but whose corporeal expressions are displaced, ungendered, onto other elements of the poem. For Eliot, poetic representation of a mighty female presence created hassles in embodying the male. In order to do so, Eliot bypasses envisioning the female, indeed, avoids attaching gender to bodies. In this way we see some kind of a transcendence of gendering for protecting the male identity.

This pattern can be clearly traced in The Love Song J. Alfred Prufrock. The poem centres on not only an unarticulated question, as all readers concur, but also an unenvisioned centre, the "one" whom Prufrock addresses. The poem never visualized the woman with whom Prufrock fancies an encounter except in fragments and in plurals - eyes, arms, skirts - synecdoches we might well imagine as fetishistic substitutions. But even these synecdochic substitutions are not clearly engendered. The braceleted arms and the skirts are typically feminine, but the faces, hands, the voices, the eyes are not. As if to displace the major human object it does not visualize, the poem projects images of the body onto the landscape (the sky, the streets, the fog), but these images, for all their overt intimation of sexuality, also evade the designation of gender (the muttering retreats of restless nights, the fog that rubs, licks, and lingers) . The most visually exact images in the poem are those of Prufrock himself, a Prufrock meticulously constructed - "My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, / My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin. ’’ (CP 14) - only

30 to be disintegrated by the roving eyes of another into gaunt arms and legs, a balding head brought in upon a platter. Besides, the images related to Prufrock are themselves, as Tony Pinkney observes, awfully unstable, attributes constructing the identity of the subject at one instant only to be wielded by the objective the next, like the pin that centres his necktie and then pins him to the wall or the arms that metamorphose into Prufrock's Kafkaesque claws. (Pinkney 44) According to Pinkney, each image can be turned inside out to show its opposite. John the Baptist may have been the luckless victim of the castrating Salome, but Lazarus was only resurrected as a consequence of Mary and Martha's imploring of Christ. There will be time, Prufrock cries, to 'murder and create', but in this poetic text aggression and idealization prove to be tantalizingly interchangeable. In the closing lines we see the mermaids wreathing Prufrock as consolingly as the fog curled about the house. It is an idealized fantasy which postpones, however dangerously, the moment of 'human' waking and drowning. Yet such wreathing is rather akin to the more intimidating engulfings or 'involvings' of Hysteria. The mystery of Prufrock leaves us reflecting, eloquent by its very silence, on the terrifying revelation that the mermaids traditionally drown their lovers. Danger dose not encroach from the external world; but is in fact lurking within this fantasy Eden from the very beginning.

The poem, in these numerous ways, disintegrates the body, making ambiguous its sexual identification. These scattered body parts at once imply and evade a major encounter the speaker cannot present himself to confront, but in the pattern of their dispersal they constitute the voice that Prufrock feels cannot exist in the intent look of the other.

For all of its magnificence as a poetic resolution of the problems in constructing a gendered identity that mark Eliot's poetry, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock concludes with a candid confession of the relational failure that is its cost.

Notes

2. This idea has been derived from Carol Christ's illuminating essay, "TheFeminineSubject in Victorian Poetry" in ELH, 54 (1987), pp. 385 - 401. 3. These words are spoken by Count Guido da Montefeltro (1223 - 98) in Dante'sInferno, xxvii, pp. 61 - 6. Cited in B. C. Southam’s A Student's Guide to the SelectedPoems of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1994, Sixth edn.) p. 47.

4. In this context I feel inclined to refer to the critical text NoMan's Land inwhichSandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain Eliot's construction of influence differentlyin arguing that Eliot's yearning for a golden age before the dissociation of sensibilityset in WAS an attempt to wipe out the history linked with the advent of women into theliterary marketplace (p. 154).

5. In her article titled, "Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme", in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 95 - 110, Nancy J. Vickers

31 contends that Petrarch tones down the threat that the sight of the female carries to his own physical integrity by transforming her visible entirety to scattered words through which he composes his RimeSparse.Vickers's paradigm is a provocative one for Eliot, although his songs cannot be labeled as songs of praise/ eulogy, and Eliot does not merely disperse the female body but decomposes all bodies.

Works Cited

1. Bernstein, Michael. “Image, Word, and Sign: The Visual Arts as Evidence in Ezra Pound’s Cantos”. Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 347-364. 2. Bush, Ronald. T.S.Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. 3. Christ, Carol. “Gender, Voice and Figuration in Eliot’s Early Poetry” in Ronald Bush (ed.) T.S.Eliot: The Modernist in History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 23-37. 4. Costello, Bonnie. “Response to Tradition and the Female Talent” in Herbert L.Sussman (ed.) Literary History: Theory and Practice, vol.2. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984. 5. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. 6. ------Poems Written in Early Youth. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. 7. Eliot, Valerie(ed.). The Letters of T.S.Eliot, vol.1, 1898-1922. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. 8. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol.1. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. 9. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T.S.Eliot. New York: Citadel, 1959. 10. Pinkney, Tony. Women in the Poetry of T.S.Eliot. London: Macmillan, 1984. 11. Swinburne, A.C. The Novels of A.C.Swinburne. New York: Farrar, 1962.

Generic Strategies and the Problematization of History in Henry V

Dr. Subhajit Sengupta

Our response to Shakespeare’s comic representation of Falstaff and the other low characters in 1 Henry IV is qualified by the dramatist’s representation of the concerns and realities of history. Apparently antithetical to comedy, history creates a tension between the comedy in the play and the essentially ‘tragic’ suggestion at the end of the play that chaos and warfare shall continue. The tragic and the comic elements combine with satire in 2 Henry IV, and the collision among tragedy, comedy, satire and history elicits a response which is more complex than that to 1 Henry IV. The rise to kingship of Prince Hal is set alongside the ultimate rejection of Falstaff, and the play’s general atmosphere, notwithstanding the comic elements, is one of disease and death. The two parts of Henry IV, taken together, conclude problematically, and there is a discernible attempt to push the second tetralogy in the direction of the problem play. Shakespeare’s varied treatment of English history reaches its culmination in Henry V, the final play in the second tetralogy. The comedic closure suggested by Henry’s marriage to Katherine is contradicted by the allusion, in the Epilogue, to the tragic events that overtook Henry V’s son and successor, Henry VI. The Epilogue is almost cruel upon the audience — who have just witnessed Henry’s engagement to Katherine — in the way in which it upsets the comedic closure not only by looking forward in time to a ‘tragic’ future, but also by taking the audience back in time to the first stage production of Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI. The dark, almost sinister opening of that play — the solemn funeral march of the dead Henry V; the Duke of Bedford’s words which begin the play: ‘Hung be the heavens with black! Yield, day, to night!’ (I.i.1); and the gloomy talk of ‘loss, of slaughter, and discomfiture’ (I.i.59) — had been, as the Epilogue in Henry V reminds the audience, shown several times on the stage. The comedic closure of Henry V is thus qualified by an Epilogue that associates this play with the grim and tragic incidents of the first tetralogy — England’s defeat at the hands of France in the closing years of the ‘Hundred years War’, represented in 1 Henry VI, followed by the disputes and the battles of the ‘Wars of the Roses’. That Henry V is a definite step in the direction of Shakespeare’s fashioning of the problem play has been argued by critics such as Jonathan Hart. Hart says that the problems created by the rejection of Falstaff in 2 Henry IV are not only left unresolved in that play, they continue to surface in Henry V. The satirical elements of 2 Henry IV steadily fashion themselves into a certain problematic ‘and Henry V itself partly explores and does not quite answer the problems of kingship and history that begin with Richard’s fall, continue as rebellion in Fastaff and in the body politic, and question authority until the rejection of Falstaff creates a rebellion in some members of the audience against the authority of Henry the Fifth, if not of Shakespeare himself’ (Hart 161).

Henry V employs the comical, tragical, epical, satirical, and pastoral modes. The generic term, ‘History play’, and not the modal terms mentioned above, informs us about the external form of Henry V. Since the dominant mode is comic, Henry V has often been seen as a ‘comical history’; the other modes either briefly undermine, or are subservient to this dominant mode. This paper seeks to examine the manner in which the friction between the genre of the History play and each of the modes in Henry V threatens the survival of the genre of the History play itself, and pushes Henry V towards the developing genre of the problem play. The play’s refusal to satisfactorily ‘answer’ the questions that it raises is characteristic of the problem play. The problematics of history become increasingly obscure and unanswerable in the course of the movement from Richard II, through 1 and 2 Henry IV, to Henry V. The elements of the problem play, evident also in Hamlet and Twelfth Night, become so pronounced in Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measure that their external forms fashion themselves into a distinctive generic mould. Frederick S. Boas used the term ‘problem play’ to describe All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet (Boas 289). William Witherle Lawrence excludes Hamlet form the list because he finds it hard to determine whether a tragedy may qualify also as a problem play. Lawrence assigns the name ‘problem play’ to ‘those productions which clearly do not fall into the category of tragedy, and yet are too serious and analytic to fit the commonly accepted conception of comedy’ (Lawrence 22)1. Lawrence says that problem plays have settings and plot-structures resembling romances, but receive serious treatment from the playwright; they deal with ‘painful experiences and with the darker complexities of human nature’, offer us ‘unpleasant and sometimes even repulsive episodes, and characters whose conduct gives rise to sustained questioning of action and motive’, and leave us ‘excited, fascinated, perplexed, for the issues raised preclude a completely satisfactory answer’ (20-1). Paul Edmondson observes that All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida, are plays that ‘are fascinated by anti-heroism which complicates any notion of a dominant hero or heroine. Each play presents its audience with a morally complex and frustrated universe through which no direct course of action may be taken and in which no satisfying choices can be made’ (Edmonson 268). Henry’s nature is more complex than it appears on the surface. We have his horrifying threat to the governor of Harfleur, and we begin to question his actions and motive and the very legitimacy of his claims to the crowns of England and France. Suggestions of the anti-heroic exist not only in Henry but in the fabric of the play itself. Its universe is one of complex moral values: in other words, the thematics of the play include conflicting positions that are dramatized in such a way as to render impossible the making of choices. In drawing upon a wide variety of popular, as well as aristocratic, heroic traditions, Henry V fulfills several formal requirements of the classical epic. The action is of large magnitude and the central theme is war; the protagonist, being the king, is a figure of national importance and his fortunes reflect the fortunes of his nation; the action of the play emphasizes the will of God, as Henry, in response to the Dauphin’s mocking gift of tennis balls, threatens disastrous consequences for France but asserts that an English victory over the French ‘lies all within the will of God’ (I.ii.289). The emphasis on the will of God finds further and more passionate expression when Henry, after the victory at Agincourt, declares:

O God, thy arm was here, And not to us, but to thy arm alone Ascribe we all. (IV.viii.106-8) The play uses the elevated style of the epic to provide verbal resonances of the action. The Chorus begins the epic narration by invoking the Muse in the Prologue, giving the play a conventional epic beginning. We have catalogues of warriors, and epithets such as ‘deep mouth’d sea’ (V.Chorus.11) and ‘the warlike Harry’ (Prologue.5). Still, as a mode in Henry V, the epic has only an incomplete repertoire. The Chorus inspires the audience’s imagination, makes epic gestures, exalts Henry’s heroism, and is a synthesis of bombast and imagery. Henry is imagined as a god of war, as a ‘Mars’ (6). The Chorus’s mention of ‘so great an object’ (11), ‘the vasty fields of France’ (12) and ‘two mighty monarchies’ (20) encourages the audience to imagine the conflict between England and France in elevated, epic terms. Even during the apology to the audience for the limitations of the Elizabethan stage (8-14), the Chorus constantly keeps the audience aware of the epic scale of the battle through expressions such as ‘so great’, ‘vasty fields’, and ‘the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt.’ The Chorus’s apology seems to imply that the playwright and the audience are as imperfect as the stage in representing the heroic action. Inherent in the Chorus’s persuasions to the audience to exercise its imagination and create the ideal that the stage can hardly represent is the recognition that the perception of such an ideal lies beyond the audience’s ability. In Henry V, the epic ideal exists only in the audience’s imagination which the Chorus frequently inspires. Immediately after the Prologue, Act I opens with a scene of political intrigue which introduces the audience to the politic causes of war, to ‘the backroom manipulations of duplicitous clerics contemplating strategy’ (Ross 175). All the speeches of the Chorus in the play, while aiding the process of epic idealization, are immediately followed by stage representations of history which undermine the claims of the Chorus, and also problematize the relationship between choral ideology and ideology-resisting reality. This negation of the strong appeal of the heroic material is deliberate. The inaccessibility of heroic ideals on the stage was surely known to Shakespeare, and he could not have failed to see that ‘epic history’ is essentially an oxymoron. Phyllis Rackin, while speaking of the function of the Chorus in the play, says that ‘far from activating the dramatic illusion, it can only disrupt it, foregrounding the present theatrical occasion and reminding the audience that what they are about to see performed…is totally inadequate to present the historical events and persons’ (205). The patriotic mythmaking that surrounds Henry is deconstructed by the subtleties of history which are organized to undercut the Chorus’s attempts to produce, in Henry, an English parallel to classical and literary heroes. The Chorus’s vision is revealed as myopic and selective; the realities of history are broader and more complex, not lending themselves to idealization. Hugh Grady appears convinced that the action of the play contradicts the Chorus; he affirms that ‘legend is partial and one dimensional, and we are presented instead with a Shakespeare representation much more complex, layered, and nuanced than the materials of the legend were’ (218). The epic form is superimposed upon comic, realistic, and skeptical content, and in this the play resembles King John and the Henry IV plays.

The dramatic representation in Henry V keeps changing from epic to historical, as the epic mode remains in constant confrontation with the genre of the History play. This confrontation causes instability in the play: the stage representation shifts constantly, abruptly and uneasily from epic ideals to political realities. The political realism — together with elements of parody, comedy and satire — create a variety of effects which counter the Elizabethan conception of epic dignity. Henry’s rallying cry to his English soldiers before the siege of Harfleur, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more’(III.i.1) is soon parodied by Bardolph in the opening line of the following scene: ‘On, on, on, on! To the breach, to the breach!’ (III.ii.1). The grand prophecy of the Chorus before Act II is followed by a low-life scene involving Bardolph, Nym, Pistol, the Hostess and the Boy. This scene upsets the generic expectations created by the Chorus of Act II regarding the presentation of a battle where Henry will achieve a glorious victory over the French. Aroused expectations of triumph and conquest are challenged not only by the petty fight between Nym and Pistol in II.i, but also by the sad news of Falstaff’s sickness. Though the dominant tone in the speech of the Chorus there is still strongly one of idealization, the reference in it to the three conspirators resists the process of idealization. The Machiavellian intrigue of Cambridge, Scroop and Grey constitutes a betrayal which alludes to ‘the paranoid culture of treason surrounding the post Armada Elizabethan court, possibly even one specifically evoking Essex’s zeal in detecting…the supposed treachery of Dr. Lopez towards Elizabeth’ (Grady 222). The scene following the speech of the Chorus of Act IV involves the disguised king’s argument with Williams who speaks about the dubious nature of the causes leading to the war, and about its grim consequences. This is followed by a mood of bitterness and disillusionment in a soliloquy that Henry speaks. Hugh Grady points out that Henry neither answers nor contests Michael Williams’s initial argument that the destruction wrought by war may be excused only if the cause be just (235). Williams’s argument remaining unanswered and uncontested is yet another testimony to the play’s refusal to answer the questions it raises, a feature anticipating the problem play. This questioning of the justification of the war against France — a justification expounded in tedious detail by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Salic Law speech in I.ii — leads to a questioning of the legitimacy of Henry’s claim to the French throne. Canterbury uses the Salic Law to justify such a claim, but the preceding scene — I.i — has revealed that Canterbury’s chief concern is not Henry’s claim to France but the need to divert Henry’s attention from the Parliamentary Bill, which seeks to appropriate huge amounts of the Church’s wealth, by advocating war with France. The issue of the legitimacy of the claim to the French throne is thus problematized. Robert B. Pierce points out that the king’s title to his own crown is also explicitly questioned in the king’s prayer the night before Agincourt (231). The problematics inhere in the issue of a king’s eligibility for legitimacy. Henry V, by virtue of being son to Henry IV, is apparently the legitimate heir to the English throne. This legitimacy is, however, interrogated by the king himself in his prayer on the night before Agincourt: Not today, O Lord, O not today, think not upon the fault My father made in compassing the crown. (IV.i.289-291)

While Henry’s soliloquy following his argument with Williams looks at the reality of kingship beneath the illusory trappings of ceremony, the encounter with Williams and Bates, and his own prayer, interrogate his legitimacy to the French and English thrones respectively. The play leaves the questions unresolved and exposes the political world of the second tetralogy as Machiavellian, a world where, as Grady asserts, ‘all titles to power are always already counterfeit because legitimacy is a fiction established by the most deft political practitioner’ (229). The deft political practitioners here are Henry IV and his son, Henry V, both of whom have powerfully established the fiction of legitimacy. The note of discordance which is created when the action and the dialogue proceed to contradict, challenge, undermine, complicate, qualify, or darken the upbeat and epic narration by the Chorus, generates ‘critical, anti–war and anti- imperialist thematics’ in the play. Grady recognizes in them a ‘consistent counterpoint’ to the epic idealization. This, he says, creates a ‘political unconscious’ in the play which contradicts the ‘elements celebrating war and conquest’ (234-5). ‘Political unconscious’ is the name that Grady gives to what may be seen as the sub- text of the play: a mordant commentary on politics and war, in which Henry is a Machiavellian militarist, a cold–blooded, power–hungry hypocrite who uses religion to justify the horrors of an unnecessary war. It is this realm of the political unconscious that creates the play’s dialectic between epic ideals and unheroic realites, complicating and problematizing its representation of history. The political unconscious contains the dynamics that construct the fictive image of heroism. Warren D. Smith proposes that the passages of the Chorus in Henry V did not appear in the original text of 1599 but were added at a later date when the play was privately performed at court (38-57). The title page of the Q1 text of 1600 states that the play had been performed ‘sundry times’ by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Since the only recorded court performance of the play belongs to the Jacobean period, it is likely that the performances referred to on the title page of Q1 were performances in the public playhouses. Since the Q1 text does not contain the speeches of the Chorus, it is generally assumed that these speeches were written at a later date, probably for the first recorded court performance of January 7, 1605 (Jones 100).2 However, the quarto text is an abbreviated version of the play, and the presence in the Folio of any material absent from the quarto is hardly any indication of subsequent rewriting. The problems generated by the presence of the Chorus would have been invisible to early audiences of Henry V, had W. D. Smith’s views been established beyond doubt as correct. Henry V is also characterized by the conflict of the comic and the tragic. Although the comic mode dominates, the Hostess’s description of Falstaff’s death in II.ii erases permanently the boisterous comedy of 1 and 2 Henry IV. Pistol and Bardolph attempt to carry on from where Falstaff left off, but the comic heights of the earlier plays are never achieved. Falstaff’s death must necessarily follow his rejection in 2 Henry IV; his presence in Henry V would have subverted the process of idealization too strongly and concealed the subtleties in the conflict between the epic and the counter–epic. Shakespeare could not possibly allow ‘the warlike Harry’, whom the Chorus declares to be ‘the mirror of all Christian Kings’, to be smirched by any further association with his old companions of Eastcheap, and so he cleared the stage of all of them, beginning with Falstaff. The closing passages of 2 Henry IV

37 suggest that Henry V would mark a departure from the subversive comedy that characterizes the Henry IV plays. In Falstaff’s absence, Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol, the ‘three swashers’ (III.ii.29- 30), participate in some rollicking low-life scenes in the play’s underplot. After Bardolph and Nym have been executed, the captains — men of higher standing than Bardolph, Nym and Pistol — join Pistol in enlivening the stage. While the Scotsman, James, and the Irishman, Macmorris, contribute to the comedy with their peculiarities of national speech, Fluellen appeals to our sense of the comic by his pedantic insistence on following the strategies of the ancients with regard to the techniques of warfare. His conversation with the English captain, Gower, although comic in its comparisons between Henry and Alexander, and Monmouth and Macedon, is also scathing in its implied subversion of the heroic Henry. He asks Gower where ‘Alexander the Pig’ (IV.vii.12-13) was born, his Welsh accent substituting or ‘Big’, in the sense of ‘great’, with ‘Pig’. Be that as it may, ‘Pig’ also is a grossly unflattering pointer to Henry as a vicious, bloodthirsty militarist. Fluellen then proceeds to compare Monmouth, where Henry was born, with Macedon, the birthplace of Alexander. The dominant comic mode here mingles effectively with the satirical and the tragic modes. The hints of tragedy lie in Fluellen’s words on the ruthless slaughter of the French prisoners, and in the allusion to the rejection of Falstaff, which allegedly broke the latter’s heart and killed him. We are reminded, in the comparison involving Alexander’s killing of Cleitus, of Hostess Quickly’s words earlier in the play about Falstaff’s illness and impending death: ‘The King has killed his heart’ (II.i. 84). Fluellen’s allusion to Falstaff recalls the Hostess’s poignant description of Falstaff’s death in II.iii, introducing thereby the ‘tragic past’ of the play into the ‘comic present’ of the discourse. We have already taken note of how the Chorus creates an image of an idealized Henry which the scenes deconstruct: in Fluellen’s words, that dialectic method is replaced by the capability of the words to lend themselves simultaneously to two opposed readings. The satire is too obvious to be inaccessible. Calling Alexander ‘Alexander the Pig’ is as much a pointer to Fluellen’s Welsh accent as it is a denigration of Henry. So is the comparison between Monmouth and Macedon, where the lack of substance itself, while making the comparison outrageously comic, also suggests satirical intentions. The counterbalancing of the comic by the tragic and the satiric is also discernible in the representation of Henry, and two scenes immediately call for critical attention. One is IV.i., where the playwright uses the motif of disguise and mistaken identity; and the other is V.ii, where Henry woos Katherine and thereby attempts to imitate the comedic form of redemptive history. Anne Barton refers to Geoffery Bullough’s argument that Shakespeare, in making Henry disguise himself in IV.i. in Erpingham’s cloak, was actually thinking of a similar disguise adopted by Germanicus in Tacitus’s Annals. Barton then proceeds to cite plays closer to Shakespeare’s own time where kings disguise themselves — George a Greene (1590), supposedly by Robert Greene, Peele’s Edward I (1591), two anonymous plays Fair Em (1590) and The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1590), and Thomas Heywood’s The First Part of King Edward IV, written prior to 1599, and therefore before Shakespeare’s Henry V (208-10)3. In all these plays, says Barton, the king’s gesture is ‘a romantic gesture’, and ‘the people they meet come from the world of balladry and legend’ (212). In Henry V, the

38 disguised king’s encounter with the common soldiers does not lend itself to a comedic resolution. The comic mode stops short of extending to a comedic closure. Here, Fowler’s distinction between modes and genres becomes relevant (107)4, and challenges Anne Barton’s contention that Shakespeare ‘never wrote a comical history’ (232). Fowler has argued that modal terms, in describing a play, are generally used in the adjectival sense and genre terms, as nouns. A. P. Rossiter is nearer the mark when he declares that ‘comic History’ was Shakespeare’s ‘true genre’, and that his earliest experiments with ‘comic History’ were 2 and 3 Henry VI (58). Shakespeare reworks the convention of the comic motif of the disguised king and questions its boundaries. He questions too, in the process, the relationship between a war-monger king and his disgruntled soldiers, the justification of the war, the extent of the king’s responsibility for the deaths of soldiers killed in war, and the legitimacy of Henry’s claim to monarchy. ‘Comical history’ and ‘tragical history’ fashion themselves into a remarkable union of modes and genres, which leads in the direction of the problem play. Shakespeare makes the value–neutral facts of the chronicles meaningful and subservient to certain ideologies by encoding them within a complex pattern of modes and genres. The generic strategies adopted by Shakespeare for emplotting5 history reveal its essentially tragicomic nature and strips it of its associations with epic, myth and legend. The closing scene of Henry V, with the wooing of Katherine by Henry, directs ‘the dramatic spotlight onto the issue of royal lineage’ (Jardine 7). Incorporation, which is the generic impulse of comedy, is enacted again and again in V.ii. Henry addresses King Charles of France as ‘Brother’ (V.ii.83), the French Queen calls Henry ‘Qur gracious brother’ (V.ii.92), and Henry calls her ‘fair sister’ (V.ii.90). This element of comic incorporation is preceded in the scene by Burgundy’s graphic description of a ravaged France, where the detailed pastoral imagery involving ‘hedges even-plashed / Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair’ (V.v.42-3), ‘disordered twigs’ (V.v.44), and ‘hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs’ (V.v.52), creates the impression of a mangled, disordered and ravished French garden. Henry’s greeting of the French king as ‘our brother France’ (V.v.2.) and Queen Isabel’s ‘So happy be the issue, brother England, / Of this good day and of this gracious meeting’ (V.v.12-13) are further challenged, immediately before the wooing of Katherine, by Henry’s assertion that the French princess is part of the articles that England is to receive as a result of the Treaty of Troyes: She is our capital demand, comprised Within the fore-rank of our articles. (V. v. 96-7). The problematics of power undermine the wooing scene. The fact that Henry V ends with a wooing scene that leads to marriage suggests the play’s affinity with the genre of romantic comedy. One is rattled, however, by the grave reminder in the Epilogue that Henry’s marriage to Katherine produced Henry VI, who, crowned while still an infant, lost France which his father had won, and was also unable to resist civil wars in England. The suggestions of romantic comedy are questioned and qualified. Tennenhouse says that romantic comedy and chronicle history, in spite of their differences, ‘use the same rhetorical strategy to produce political order out of sexual and political relations’ (111). In Henry V, the political order restored at the end is unstable, and disrupts the movement towards a conventional comedic closure. The

39 romantic gestures of the wooing scene are also qualified by Henry’s rhetoric in the scene. Henry’s use of the plain idiom of prose in the wooing of Katherine produces a subversion of the tradition of Petrarchan courtly love, a tradition invoked in the very act of wooing, only to be subverted by the rhetoric employed to carry it out. Shakespeare’s emplotment of chronicle material in a complex but very effective system of modes and genres complicates the representation of history on stage. The wooing of Katherine and Henry’s marriage to her anticipate a closure proper to romantic comedies, but such a closure is resisted by the Epilogue’s evocation of the open-endedness of history. ______

NOTES

1. It is significant that Lawrence uses the word ‘comedies’ instead of ‘plays’ in the title of his book. 2. Jones agrees with Warren D. Smith’s contention that the Chorus is better suited to a private court performance than a public performance, and says that the images and the complaints in the Chorus suggest a performance in the octagonal Royal Cockpit which was frequently used in James’s reign for private court performances. The ‘wooden O’ in the Prologue may refer to the Royal Cockpit. 3. The dates of the plays mentioned correspond to those in Barton’ essay. 4. Alastair Fowler lucidly explains the difference between modes, kinds and genres. Some hair-splitting with regard to the terms ‘kind’ and ‘genre’ notwithstanding, he admits that the two are essentially very similar. Kinds, he says, include features such as size and external form, and thus may be distinguished from genres. However, René Wellek and Austin Warren, in Theory of Literature: A Seminal Study of the Nature and Function of Literature in All Its Contexts (1949; USA: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 231., assert that generic grouping is based upon both external form and internal form. Fowler says that modal terms are generally used in their adjectival forms, do not reflect a ‘complete external form’ and always ‘have always an incomplete repertoire, a selection only of the corresponding kind’s features, and one from which overall external structure is absent’. See also Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 243-337. Frye presents certain universal genres and modes as the key to organizing the entire literary corpus. 5. See Hayden White, p. 83. By ‘emplotment’, White means ‘the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures.’

WORKS CITED 1. Barton, Anne ‘The King Disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Comical History.’ Essays Mainly Shakespearean. Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986: 207-33. Print. 2. Boas, Frederick S. Shakspere and His Predecessors. 1896. Calcutta: Rupa, 1963. Print.

3. Edmondson, Paul. ‘Comical and Tragical.’ Wells and Orlin 267-78. Print. 4. Grady, Hugh. Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from ‘Richard II’ to ‘Hamlet’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print. 5. Hart, Jonathan. Theater and World: The Problematics of Shakespeare’s History. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992. Print. 6. Jardine, Lisa. Reading Shakespeare Historically. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Print. 7. Jones, G.P ‘“Henry V”: The Chorus and the Audience.’ Shakespeare Survey, 31: Shakespeare and the Classical World. Ed. Kenneth Muir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1978: 93-104. Print. 8. Lawrence, William Witherle. Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies. 1931. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969. Print. 9. Pierce, Robert B. Shakespeare’s History Plays: The Family and the State. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1971. Print. 10. Rackin, Phyllis. ‘Henry V.’ Wells and Orlin 205-11. Print. 11. Ross, A. Elizabeth. ‘Hand-me-Down Heroics: Shakespeare’s Retrospective of Popular Elizabethan Heroical Drama in Henry V.’ Shakespeare’s English Histories: A Quest for Form and Genre. Ed. John W. Velz. Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997: 171-204. Print. 12. Rossiter, A.P. Angel with Horns: Fifteen Lectures on Shakespeare. Ed. Graham Storey. 1961. Longman, 1992. Print. 13. Smith, Warren D. ‘The Henry V Choruses in the First Folio.’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LIII, No. 1 (January 1954): 38-57. Print. 14. Tennenhouse, Leonard ‘Strategies of State and political plays : A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII.’ Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultral Materialism. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. 1985. Manchester University Press, 2000: 109-28. Print. 15. Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor. Gen. eds. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Compact Edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Print. [All quotations from Shakespeare are from this edition.] 16. Wells, Stanley, and Lena Cowen Orlin, eds. Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print. 17. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978. Print.

Feminism- When does it really start in India?

Binda Sharma

What is feminism? Is it a philosophy or just another new style of writing? It has been rightly mentioned that over the years Indian writing has undergone a long arduous journey. But today when we look back at things we are sure that what we have witnessed is nothing but a cusp of the miracle to come. Indian writing has now become one of the pillars of the modern literature and shall be one of the torchbearers for the years to come. Now over the years it has been accused that the males have somehow dominated the fairer sex. No matter how bizarre it may seem considering the daily dosage of Ekta Kapoor serials that we are fed continually and which has nothing but the power and cunning of women to offer. The daily remote is no longer in the hands of the alpha male but in that of the alpha female. Leaving the jokes aside, for years now the literati has been entirely comprised and dominated by the male authors and writers. Some of them of course were brilliant, some passable and others wrote just because the profession brought money and respect. Now curbing the literary tastes of a man (and I use the word man as a general term for Homo sapiens, a bit sexist but that’s how we were taught) is equivalent to curbing his natural sensory organs. A man denied his literary taste is like a rudderless ship waiting to erupt in a rebellion and bringing in a huge upheaval. The post-independence era clearly marks the grand inception of literary emancipation of women. Finally a new breath of life was given to the failing literature, the gift of women sensibility. For centuries now, the woman’s sensibility has been hailed as greatest when it came to her being the mother but sadly, when she wanted to write or dictate the course of the literary development of the society her efforts were decried. Finally we had a piece of writing that actually talked about women which was written by a woman. We had wonderful writers in Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, Ella Wheeler Willcox and so on who have carried the baton of woman writing for over 200 years. But the question that has to be asked is this, is this enough? Is this the best that our mothers, or sisters or daughters can do? Well my dear friends the answer most definitely is NO. In the recent time we have had the privilege of having some of the brightest and prolific woman writers enthrall us by those lovely knitting of words. Writers like Anita Desai, Nayantara Sehgal, Sashi Deshpande, Arundhati Roy have made us realize how fortunate enough are we to look into the moral and psychic dilemmas of the women by the eyes of another one. They not only have brought about a change in the mindset of the reader but have also broadened the horizon of our literature. But as we all are, we love to typecast things. Instead of calling it a beautiful creation by an extraordinary mind we like to call it Feminsation of the literature. It is right that these women authors have to be given their due for the impossible enrichment of our daily dosage of readings but why do we have to separate them from their male counterparts.

Lets for a moment, take a step back and really look over feminism and what it really is. Feminism is an intellectual, philosophical and political discourse aimed at equal rights and legal protection for women. It involves various movements, theories, and philosophies, all concerned with issues of gender difference; that advocate equality for women; and that campaigns for women's rights and interests. A lot of experts feel that this feminism that we witness today in the 21st century is nothing but the direct product of the “Women’s Movement” of 1960s. Infact they believe that feminism came as a result of feminist movements which was in three phases. The first wave was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the second was in the 1960s and 1970s, and the third extends from the 1990s to the present. Feminist theory emerged from these feminist movements. It has manifested in a variety of disciplines such as feminist geography, feminist history and feminist literary criticism. Now even if all this was not enough Feminism has further been broken into a million other philosophies like Socialist & Marxist Feminism, Radical Feminism, Black Feminism etc. Feminism has served one very important task. It has brought in socialization in the literature. It has not only provided role models for women but also for men, what constituted as acceptable forms of feminine goals and aspirations. Feminsitic writing has also been through various phases when it comes to style of writing. For starters they did what every newcomer tries to do, imitate the successful. In this the female writers copied their male counterparts and their artistic and aesthetic norms. But slowly the women writers started evolving and then a new style of writing came in which was finally the feminine phase. Thus came, Feminist literary criticism. It is literary criticism informed by feminist theories or politics. Its history has been varied, from classic works of female authors such as George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in women's studies and gender studies by "third-wave" authors. In the most general, feminist literary criticism before the 1970s was concerned with the politics of women's authorship and the representation of women's condition within literature. Since the arrival of more complex conceptions of gender and subjectivity, feminist literary criticism has taken a variety of new routes. It has considered gender in the terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as part of the deconstruction of existing power relations. There have been arguments over the years that feminist writing is no different than liberalist writings but there is a difference. The feminist writing relies heavily on no literary items like diaries, journals etc in understanding the literary text. The most important question that has always been raised is whether there exists a language that is inherently feminine. This has always been a cause of great many debates. Writers like Virginia Wolff have tried hard to prove so. To comment on this I shall like to quote the work of Marks & de Courtivron, New French Feminism Harvester, 1981 “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility which will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded…it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric (male dominated) system; it does and will take place in

43 areas other than those subordinated to philosohico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of by subjects who are breakers of automatism by peripheral figures that no authority can subjugate.” Here the word feminine seems to exist in another realm and the writer a perennial freedom fighter a rather anarchic one. No why don’t we have a look at the advent of feminism in India. The history of feminism in India is regarded as mainly a practical effort. Compared to some other countries there has been only sparse theoretical writing in feminism. Feminism was theorized differently in India than in the west. Colonization of "Indian culture" and reconstruction of Indian womanhood as the epitome of that culture through social reform movements resulted in political theorization in the form of nationalism rather than as feminism alone. Indian feminist scholars and activists have to struggle to carve a separate identity for feminism in India. They define feminism in time and space in order to avoid the uncritically following Western ideas. Indian women negotiate survival through an array of oppressive patriarchal family structures: age, ordinal status, relationship to men through family of origin, marriage and procreation as well as patriarchal attributes - dowry, siring sons etc. - kinship, caste, community, village, market and the state. So, now the question remains to us. India, which we have always rightly, justly or just a pure figment of our grandfather’s imagination, has always been the cradle of civilization. & yet when I look up to the literature that seeps out of the mafia male corridors of India a whiff of feministic writings exists which is nothing but a cry of how oppressed our females our. West, the culture we so love to deride in our drawing rooms has now a strong & a prevailing sense of feministic touch in every art form & not just literature. You hear about singers & painters getting in touch with their feminine side to better their profession. India somehow with all our knowledge has lagged behind in giving “Devi Shakti” her due. I believe pandals & bhakti music is not just the answer to the feminine revolution in India. For me let Durga write, Kali sing & Saraswati preach me.

Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla: A Study of His Poetry

Bijay Kant Dubey

Keki N.Daruwalla, who was born on the 24th of January,1937 at Lahore, in the then time British India, is without any doubt one of those writers of Indian English poetry who have really worked for the growth and development of modern poetry right from the seventies and since then have been contributing to it. Now the time has come to make a full-length assessment of his poetry. One among the Parsi quartet, taking Adil Jussawalla, K.D.Katrak and Gieve Patel altogether, he has been plodding his way to leave an imprint of his own individuality and calibre. Sardonic and sarcastic, he is a poet of some hard heart, as because sentimentality has nothing to do with. He sees it all with his hawkish imagery and landscape of delving. Violence, pestilence, epidemic, drought, famine, bloodshed, riot, murder, suicide, enmity, vengeance, wrath, anger, animality and curfew are the specific words of the poet. As a writer of verse, he is but a tragedian and poems to him are dramatic monologues or bits of tragedies. Tears are not there into the eyes of the poet and these cannot wet him. A few have really understood his worth and relevance, so substantial, so robust and healthy and his scribbling is not for a timid heart at all, as because his is a heart of a hunter; that of a falconer. Nature red in tooth and claw is the spirit and he seeks to view life in that perspective, as by training and profession he is an IPS. Apart from his early education done here and there, he finally did his M.A. in English from Govt.College, Ludhiana. In 1958, he qualified for the IPS and joined it and the resultant posting and placement thereafter took him to different places, as such Dehradun, Meerut, Agra, Barabanki, Farrukhabad, Luknow, Joshimath, Ranikhet and others in the U.P. Daruwalla was a Visiting Fellow at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford during 1980-82. Under Orion is the first book of poems with which he starts the poetic journey of his life and it was none but P.Lal who himself brought it out from his Writers Workshop. At that time there had been a few takers of his poetry. But the very fist work too showed the promise. Apparition in April (1971), Crossing of Rivers (1976), Winter Poems (1980), The Keeper of the Dead (1982), Landscapes (1987), A Summer of Tigers (1995), Night River (2000), The Map-maker (2002), The Scarecrow and the Ghost (2004), etc. are the collections of poems. He received the Sahitya AKademi Award for his book named The Keeper of the Dead in 1984. Collected Poems (1970-2005) has appeared from Penguin, India in 2006; Two Decades of Indian Poetry (1960-1980), published in 1980, is his edited volume. Today he is not only a poet, but also a short story writer and a novelist.

A modern poet, he has his own terminology and diction. Most of the poems of Daruwalla appear to be hard and tough from the exterior level, but are not so, as because there is a softer interior to be seen across and admired for and this is his specific quality, which he has been perfecting for so long, and that too since the start. The modern English poets are the poetic specimens of the poet under our scrutiny and perusal as he has been delving into the domains of Indian English poesy in his own way. Though there is something very strongly Indian in him, his is a Parsi heart and soul. A Parsi poet, if to go deep into the content of his poetry and his life-

45 philosohy, what did he say and what were his teachings, we shall come to mark them. The references to the tower of silence, on which the Parsis place their dead for the scavenger birds to do away with and the fire hymns find their mention in the works of the poet apart from the things of his place of growing up and living down. The decades of human time can be penetrated in terms of home-seeking, shelter and displacement. There is nothing to question him with regard to the theme of Indianness, the process of Indianization that it takes within its course of naturalization and the Indianism he propagates for in the usage and selection of words and terms, as because he is deeply rooted into the soil of India, apart from his legacy, heritage, history, lineage, thought and tradition he belongs to and there is nothing as that to intercept him on the midway in connection with that. His understanding of India, Indian thought, culture and philosophy can be found in his love for Charvaka and Karna as Adil Jussawalla has for Eklavya. To read Dauwalla is to take into consideration the other part of India which remains incomplete if we know not Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism and so on. If Jayanta Mahapatra seems to be inclined towards Odisha and Odia culture and thought, landscape and scenery, Keki N. Daruwalla seems to be inclined towards U.P. as for posting and landscapic imagery and so much beholden to Maharashtra and Gujarat as for Parsi dispersion and searching of roots and nativity and tradition.

If we go through the poems of Keki N. Daruwalla, we shall come to feel that the dramatic monologue, internal rhyme-scheme and tougher exterior which he employs for his poetry take him to the pedestal of Robert Browning, and the violence, cruelty and wolfish wrap of Ted Huhes-like imagery and metaphors present the other side of the creation. A modern poet, he cannot lay his heart easily. Daruwalla’s heart is not at all a Blakian heart, so full of childish innocence and ignorance. The call of the wild he hears by slinging the gun over the shoulder; the hyenas giving calls at dark eve in the forests, the roars and growls of tigers and lions and the deer fleeing for life is the scenery of his poetry and this too is a truth which we cannot negate. The rule of the jungle only the junglees know. Survival of the fittest, is the focal point of brooding. The wild will remain wild, treacherous and impregnable, brutal, bloody and bestial. There is nothing that you can do, nor I can. The other violence lies nurtured within as man too is called an animal and sometimes when spurred on or provoked, it comes to in terms of mob violence and gunfire. As a poet, Daruwalla is a tragedian as because his is a tragic vision of life, seen through adverse conditions, situations, circumstances and times, but there is no Hamletian dilemma. He is hard at heart and bold enough as the barrel of the gun will speak forth. A policeman on duty with the revolver stuck into the waist is he Daruwalla the poet. The ups and downs of the poetic diagram show him in different shreds of thought and reflection. The two-forked facets of his poetry, the widening horizons, diversifying dimensions and broadening spectrums of his delving are beyond our deliberation. The satiric tone, laughing mockery, ironic tinge and tougher talk are the salient features of his poetry. The hawk, the kite and the vulture, not the scarecrow, are therein and he tries to see all though that landscape and vision. The poet does not shed crocodile’s tears. Draupadi as a small poem from Map-Maker speaks it all - the style and the tenor of his writing:

The travails of Draupadi are never-ending. It seems—some people have it in their bleeding stars: first exploited by the Pandavas, five to one, then by the Kauravas, hundred to one and now by the feminists in millions. (Keki N.Daruwalla, Collected Poems (1970-2005), Penguin Books, India, New Delhi, 2006, p.340)

A globe-trotter, a tour-taker, an adventurer, he is like Tennyson’s Ulysses or the ancient mariner of Coleridge, holding the hand, telling the tales of different climes, nationalities, historical myths and alienations, but not at all with any kind of remorse or expiation. Wrath and anger, bloodshed and violence are just elementary to all. In his thought and vision, he can move to Iran, Palestine, Syria and others. Daruwalla is not a writer like Wordsworth who will write To The Skylark and he is a poet of the hawk, the kite and the vulture ruminating over, meditating and swooping down to catch and take a hold of not the vegetarian stuffs, but the non-vegetarian things. But the depleting population of the vultures maraud the self of the poet. The tight and compact poems which he has given are not at all easy to handle. The silence of the curfew-clamped towns, manless streets, shops shut down, the palaquin-bearers taking the cholera-patients away from the rural areas and the Ghagra in spate, the flood waters swirling and swerving, corroding the banks and engulfing a vast tract of land by inundating it are the scenery of his poetry. The Professor Condoles is one of those representative poems of Daruwalla where the protagonist struck with an accident tries to define what it is tragedy, how does it come to all of a sudden keeping the people so benumbed and awestricken, blood gets spilled over, left out with nothing to do and nothing to complain against fate and destiny: Your brother died, you said? Eleven years old and run over by a car? I am so terribly sorry to hear it! (Keki N. Daruwalla, Winter Poems, Allied Publishers, New Delhi,1980, p.58) Such is the masculine verve, fervour, strength and vigour of the poet, that his condensed poetic statements have drawn praise from not only the critics from India, but from foreign, as such Robert Graves, James Finn Cotter, C. Wrightman and others. The Unrest of Desire, though of just three stanzas, covers the psychological things. The words, such as the unrest of desire, shadow in the heart, cave-impulse at the mouth and whatever mask you slap upon your face can show it all about his diction and phraseology. The poet here means to say that the embers can never be kept hidden under the cover of the ashes. The things of the heart the face will speak up. Even if one puts on the mask to hide himself, one day that too will fall down automatically. The inner conscience can never negate it. Truth will hammer out the

47 things lying hidden and the outer plasters will break forth. The slabs of concrete cannot keep it hidden. An attempt to give it some outlook of an aboriginal art too will fail finally and the truth will come to light. Inner tumult and turbulence taking over can never be hidden. The face is the speaker itself and the eye the indicator. Let us how see he suggests it the poem The Unrest of Desire selected in ‘The Keeper of the Dead’ collection:

You can’t erase the burn. It will char your dreams however you bury the shadow in the heart. (Crossing of Rivers and The Keeper of the Dead, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1991, p.43)

Daruwalla thus stands out amongst Indian English poets for bringing to a range of experience generally outside the ambit of poets.

Interrogating Kingship in King Lear

Sanjay Mukherjee

Every new reading is a misreading in that a new reading nearly always modifies very often challenges and sometimes even goes to the length of rejecting a previous reading. The second half of the 20th century, in particular, has witnessed & vigorously participated in what may be called ‘critical quarrels’ and specially Shakespeare is being subjected to these critical quarrels since the late 1970s. Each reading or theory, to be more precise, has mischaracterized not just literary theory but also the nature of literary theory’s relation to Shakespeare. All the major theoretical movements of the last century — from formalism and structuralism to deconstruction and actor-network theory, from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to feminism and queer theory, from Marxism and poststructuralist Marxism to new historicism and postcolonial theory — have developed key aspects of their methods in dialogue with Shakespeare. Both “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” that emerged in the early 1980s as theoretical and interpretive practices seek to understand literary texts of early modern i. e. Renaissance literature historically and reject the formalizing influence of previous literary studies, including New Criticism, Structuralism and Deconstruction, all of which in varying ways & degrees privilege the literary text and place only secondary emphasis on historical and social context. Traditional separations of literary and non-literary texts, “great literature” and “popular literature” are also fundamentally challenged. Thus theory almost like a ‘virus has invaded Shakespeare’. But by keeping myself aloof from the contemporary ‘critical quarrels’, I propose to make a rather humanistic reading of King Lear.

King Lear is definitely a political play dealing with the theme of kingship, but here the theme has been explored from an altogether different perspective, as Shakespeare is not so much concerned with Tudor despotism as with going back to a much older tradition in which a king should possess moral and inward qualities which would entail complete and willing subordination from the subjects. Lear is a king of ancient Britain. Naturally his kingship is seen as something far from the hierarchic structure of the state prevailing during the reign of Elizabeth or James I. By following this traditional concept, Shakespeare seeks to uphold what a king should be. He seems to suggest that a king is a ‘representative man’. In the words of Danby, he [a king] must be the fullest human expression of the community that co- operates to maintain him… The king thus stands for man at his best. And he stands for that which is best in man – the apex of mind.1 This idea of the king is more moral than political. Lear, however, lacks these virtues required of a king. At the very outset he is found to be of a ‘corrupt’ nature; inordinate power has corrupted him, as he has so long lived in the world of flattery. Kenneth Muir rightly observed, “… the appetite for flattery grows by what it feeds on”.2 So it is quite natural for him to banish those namely Cordelia and Kent who

49 refuse to flatter him. Lear thus violates the duties of a king; he is totally devoid ‘knowledge’ and ‘reason’ which he himself considers to be the ‘marks of sovereignty’. Being bereft of knowledge and reason, Lear gives up his throne to the Machiavels who have a common way of seeing people as divested of all quality except the latter’s relation to the former’s ends and thereby Lear brings about a discord in the state which inevitably brings on discord in man.

Danby argues that ‘the king should be representative man, the expression of every man’s natural honesty and as such the embodiment of the health of the state – a health of diverse parts coupled with blessed concord”.3 This disruption of the relation between the Governor and the political society to which he belongs results in a break-down of the individual on the one hand and the social and political sphere on the other. Shakespeare seems to suggest here that a ruler is not merely set over the people he rules but also related to the society for which he is appointed and is supposed to perform his office. Lear - the disordered man – brings about disorder not only in his family but also in the state making confusion between the two bodies of a king -- one physical, the other political, which was connected to the spiritual and the divine right of kings. Drawing analogies between the family and the state, it can be argued that Lear’s division of the state divides his family. Naturally we are provoked to think about the figure of the father, and then the correlative figure of the monarch, the “father” of one’s country. But the play in any way makes the analogies difficult, suggesting that the state and the family are not so easily equated here. It is evident that Shakespeare could not in any way free himself from the moral and social bias of medieval thought that a ruler should be concerned with the common weal and accordingly the health of a state depends on the mutual relationship of the ruler and the ruled. Thus the theory of the ruler’s accountability not merely to God but also to the people which was derived from the Greek, Roman and Christian traditions still continued in the political thought of the sixteenth century.

Lear’s fool-hardiness alienates him from others. In the very opening scene, when Kent, who has ever honoured Lear as his king, loved him as a father, followed him as a master and thought of him in his prayers as his great patron, protested against the rash and idiotic action of the king, Lear becomes a monster of rage and banishes a truly well-meaning subject. Kent had started in a very polite and reverential way but as soon as Lear warned him saying “The bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft” (I, i, 143), Kent at once became rude, unmannerly and blunt:

… be Kent unmannerly, When Lear is mad, what wouldst thou do, old man? (I, i, 145 – 146).

This shift from ‘Royal Lear’ to ‘thou’ and ‘old man’ was very significant in their mutual relationship. The use of ‘thou’ in place of ‘you’ was “an un-Godly token of un-Christian inequality among men” in the seventeenth century. Angus McIntosh argued that “To an audience of the time Kent’s use of ‘thou’ here must in itself have conveyed a spine-chilling effect of lese-majesty.”4 So, Kent’s violation of the allegiance befitting a subject was caused by the violation of the duties of kingship. The problem springs from not unruly subject, but unruly monarch, as in Buchanan's

50 view, though expressed in a different context, sovereignty derives from and remains with the people; the king who exercises power against their will is a tyrant and should be deposed: "Rebellions there spring less from the people than from the rulers, when they try to reduce a kingdom which from earliest times had always been ruled by law to an absolute and lawless despotism."5

Having occupied almost a God-like status in society, Lear is not in a position to go beyond flattery and formality and to accept lesser mortals as his equals, because even when he has taken up the decision of abdicating “power, / Pre- eminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty” (I, i, 130 - 132), Lear retains and clings to “the name and all the additions to a king”. Lear fails to realise that the name and all the additions to a king are nothing but the external signs of the power of a king and they appear to be absurd as soon as a king is detached from actual power. Francis Barker points out that “Lear implausibly attempts to retain the cultural form of king and even the political authority of that form without the substantial, institutional, instrumental, military, social and economic power of the crown….”6 Naturally, here we have the reduced spectacle of a reduced king and this spectacle is a reflection of kingship at stake. The gradually reducing stature of the king becomes more conspicuous in the caustic and satirical remarks of the Fool. The Fool points out to Lear: “Thou art an O without a figure.” and also to their relative status by saying that “I am a fool, thou art nothing.” Then again, the Fool’s reply --- “Lear’s shadow” to Lear’s poignant questions – “Does any here know me?” or “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” is both suggestive and ambiguous, because the Fool may mean that he is the faithful shadow of Lear even in his adversaries, so also he may imply that Lear has been reduced to the position of a shadow of his former self.

But I think, to consider King Lear as ‘a play of dispossession’ is not justified. Ultimately he learns the truth about himself and the world. “Lear’s violent dislocation from the social framework and the ideology which defined him as king makes the growth and discovery possible.”7 Though sometimes Lear’s pathetic assertion of kingship is heard as in: “Ay, every inch a king” or in “Come come; I am a king, masters, know you that?”, he, however, ultimately realises that ‘a king is merely a man’ and it is through suffering that he learns this reality. The relentless fury to which he is exposed awakens in him all sorts of moral anguish and repentance for his past deeds. He feels for his poor boy and scorns to have shelter for his own bare head. He learns to feel and to pray for the miserable and houseless poor. Through his knowledge of his kinship with animals, he gains a wide and sweeping sympathy on the tempest-riven heath. The falseness of flattery and brutality of authority which he as a king enjoyed come to be revealed to him. His passionate words for suffering humanity redeem the glory of the tragic king. From the consciousness of self-deception, false sentiment and tinsel of kingship and authority, he rises to win his purgatorial reward.

Shakespeare is not so much concerned here with the problem of revenge, rebellion, dynastic succession or regicide so pronounced in his other plays. Jonathan Dollimore may read the play as a critique of a monarchy that is out of touch with the common people. Ralph Berry describes the system of order that exists in the play as a

“theatre of monarchy” and says that the tragedy arrives because it is “precisely a play of old age, for its subject is responsible for arteriosclerotic structures of rule that malfunction through their rigidity. Nevertheless, the failure lies in that rigidity, not in the structures themselves.”8 He here rather shows that Lear is a rightful and a good king whose nature is “not the ideal but the human, natural, capable of corruption, error, rescue and regeration.”9 King Lear is neither a ‘tragedy of wrath’, nor a ‘tragedy of old age’, nor even a ‘tragedy of kingship’, though in the early part King Lear appears to be a ‘tragedy of kingship’; but in the later part it is the restoration of true kingship which has been exhibited. When Lear was actually a king, he definitely lacked the genuine royal qualities. “Titular king in itself is meaningless.”10 But Lear out of office is in a position to acquire complete humanity and thereby can discover his relationship with the poor, naked suffering wretches and this discovery is neither not merely moral but also political. L. C. Knights has suggested “This directness of relationship … is the only alternative to a predatory power-seeking whose necessary end is anarchy”11 Ultimately Lear does establish his kingly stature and completes not merely the moral but political learning process. It is in this way Lear has been able to gain ‘knowledge’ and ‘reason’ – the marks of sovereignty and accordingly becomes the ‘apex of the mind’. Whether we agree with Clare Asquith’s suggestion that King Lear is an unvarnished dramatisation of the corrupt state of James’s England or not, King Lear is not so much a dramatisation of the theme of kingship as the restoration of kingship. Shakespeare seems to have presented a picture of his ideal king in the figure of King Lear only during his ‘ripened manhood’.

Works cited 1. Danby, John F. Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature : A Study of King Lear. Faber & Faber, 1982, p. 170.

2. Muir, Kenneth (Ed.) King Lear. Methen & Co. Ltd., London, 1967, p.liii.

3. Danby, op. cit. p.175 4. McIntosh, Angus. ‘King Lear, A Stylistic Note’ in Review of English Studies, vol. XIV, No. 53, 1963, p. 56. 5. Buchanan 6. Barker, Francis. The Culture of Violence. Manchester University Press, 1993,p. 123. 7. Ryan, Kiernan. Shakespeare. Harvester Wheat Sheaf, New York, 1989, p. 68.

8. Berry, Ralph. “Lear’s System,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35.4 (Winter 1984), p. 422.

9. Danby, op. cit. p.165.

10. Danby, op. cit. p.174.

11. Knights, L. C. Shakespeare’s Politics. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985, p. 91

A Muse to the poet: ‘One rare fair woman’1 in Thomas Hardy’s life

Sudip Kr. Das

Florence Ellen Hungerford Henniker (1855-1923) played a considerable role in Thomas Hardy’s poetic career. It is interesting to note here that Florence Henniker was named after her godmother, Florence Nightingale, the great ‘lady with the lamp’, whom her father had persistently tried to marry. Thomas Hardy and Florence Henniker sustained a strong relationship between each other so long Florence Henniker lived. It smacked of friendship as well as wistful love on the part of Hardy whereas Florence Henniker never seemed to go beyond the boundary demarcated by her devotion to a great man of letters and the consequent enthusiasm at his writing. It is also worthwhile to note here that Hardy met Florence Henniker as a married woman.2 We do not expect that a man of reticence like Hardy would have confided on paper about the relationship. The strong emotions aroused in him by Florence Henniker were not much expressed in Hardy’s private letters and in the journals. We find them recorded in his poetry. This can be said about Hardy’s whole life; if one tries to trace the fabrics of his life, one will find them recorded not in his novels and short stories but in his poetry. Hardy’s second wife, Florence Dugdale Hardy referred to at least two poems, ‘A Broken Appointment’ and ‘A Thunderstorm in Town’ which can be directly associated with Florence Henniker:

You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum, You did not come.

You love not me, And love alone can lend you loyalty; I know it and knew it. But unto the store Of human deeds divine in all but name, Was it not worth a little hour or more To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be You love not me? (‘A Broken Appointment’)

Like most of Hardy’s poems, it is both highly personal and universal, that is to say it addresses something in all lovers who have at any time or another been ‘stood up’

53 and disappointed. ‘Lovingkindness’ was one of Hardy’s favourite words which he attributed to Florence Henniker. In ‘He Wonders about Himself’, Hardy seems to regard himself as a puppet, a plaything of Chance, just as he regarded Jude. The date and the incidental allusion suggest that he was thinking of Mrs. Henniker. ‘Come Not; Yet Come!’ was a song of a slightly earlier date, occasioned by the ‘beautiful large photographs’ of Florence Henniker which she sent Hardy herself. ‘At an Inn’ probably recalls their visit to Winchester, though of this one cannot be certain. ‘The Month’s Calendar’ was perhaps occasioned by Mrs. Henniker; the ending of the poem probably originated in the realization that Mrs. Henniker could not return Hardy’s affection. In ‘Death Divided’ and ‘Last Love-Word’ we may find obvious association with Mrs. Henniker. Let us read the last two lines from ‘Last Love-Word’:

When that first look and touch, Love, doomed us two !

‘A Thunderstorm in Town’ conveys the poet’s momentary impulse or wistful fantasy. In general, though the poems record moods and fancies, they clearly manifest that Hardy harboured feeling of profound affection for Mrs. Henniker, which, he soon realized, could never be returned. The frequency of notes and letters in the early phase of their relationship – there are twenty-four extant letters from June, 1893 to December, 1893 – and the suggestion that he might become the mentor of her architectural skill, all bear testimony to a strong affection which continued for at least another three years. By 1896, Hardy’s ardour presumably cooled:

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers, I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers; Yet my love for her in its fullness she herself even did not know; Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go. (‘Wessex Heights’)

Still he remained her good friend till her death. The perceptive reader of the poems may follow the palpitating drama strewn with tragic irony – the barrenness of their relationship in the autumnal days of their marriage – they struggled to protect themselves by barricading their hearts, each against the other’s.

Florence Henniker seems to have handled Hardy’s vibrant emotion with tactful firmness. There are references, both in Hardy’s letters and in his poems, to some occasion on which she made it clear that she could never return his affection. ‘A Broken Appointment’ and ‘The Month’s Calendar’, both, point to the ‘one- sidedness’ of their relationship. For then it was You let me see There was good cause Why you could not be Aught ever to me !

(‘The Month’s Calendar’) Yet Mrs. Henniker ‘provocatively’ sent her admirer gifts of books, an inkstand and other objects – as well as her photographs. She was perhaps flattered that the leading novelist of the time paid admiring court to her. how far she realized that she was the embodiment of Hardy’s life-long fantasy of the lady whom ‘the poor man’ loves, a subject of novel and poems. The lasting loyalty of Thomas Hardy and Florence Henniker, each to the other, suggests an unusual affinity, steady affection, high personal regard, keenly shared interests and – perhaps the most critical factor of a relationship in the long run – susceptibility to, and respect for, differences of outlook. F.B.Pinion says that their full story can never be known; Hardy’s letters to her are only a manifesto of one of the most fascinating relationships in literary history. Notes

1. ‘One rare fair woman’ is coined from Hardy’s poem, ‘Wessex Heights’.

2. She met Hardy in Dublin at the Vice-regal Lodge in May, 1893. There is no definite proof that they met earlier.

A Journey from inaction (Akarma) to action (karma): Hamlet and Arjuna in the light of ‘Niskam Karma’

Debdas Roy

Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which Srimad Bhagavadgita and Hamlet keep a grip on people’s mind through the ages. They have stood up to the diligent and skeptical scrutiny of the centuries. Both the texts illumine some of our concerns regarding our ways of life and the meaning of human existence. Of course, there are some fundamental points of incompatibility between the two works. There is generic difference. Srimad Bhagavadgita forms part of an epic while Hamlet belongs to the category of dramatic poetry. Arjuna, one of the chief ‘characters’ in Srimad Bhagavadgita attains divine grace. But the concept of grace does not match with the idea of tragedy because a tragic hero, who attains grace and salvation, fails to arouse emotions proper to tragedy. A tragic hero attains a higher vision of life but he never attains salvation which does damage to his status as a tragic hero. Salvation weakens cathartic effect. Even while admitting these differences between the two texts, one is struck by their thematic connections in some points. Like Arjuna, Hamlet is a “delicate and tender prince” (4. 4. 48)1, though the latter is much more complex as a character. Both of them are crippled by their “speculative intellect and sensitivity” (Foakes 287) in a ‘masculine’ world of cut- throat enmity where ‘conscience’ is the other name of ‘cowardice’. Let us have a look into the initial circumstances they had been pitted against. Both of them try to understand reality in the face of trying circumstances – a critical circumstance of war. They had to raise war against their respective ‘relatives’ – a war labeled by them as ‘impious’ and ‘sinful’. They are dominated by a reigning feeling of doubt which leads to wise melancholy. Definitely it is a paradoxical kind of doubt which, if cleared, offers a glimpse of the ultimate truth. A man who is not capable of doubt is not worthy of faith. This is true of both Arjuna and Hamlet. Both are ‘sad’ at the beginning. The first chapter of Srimad Bhagavadgita has been named “Arjuna Visad Yoga” and in the final Act of Hamlet we come across the words, “the bravery of his grief” (5.2.80). When the holy war is about to begin Arjuna sees in both the armies his near relatives. At the sight of these loved and respected kinsmen Arjuna’s mind begins to reel and he is full of sadness. He does not find anything good in killing his own kith and kin. He does not want to gain happiness by slaying his kinsmen. He is not going to shoulder the consequences of sin caused by the slaying of his own extended family. He argues that the people warring against him, with their understanding clouded by greed, do not perceive the evil of destruction of their own families. Arjuna thinks that he will be committing the same crime as the supporters of Duryodhana are about to commit if he fights and

1 The Cambridge Shakespeare. Ed. Philip Edwards. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1984. Print. has been followed throughout for textual references.

56 kills. It seems that Arjuna is a follower of the Biblical injunction “Thou shalt not kill” without knowing it. Hamlet, on the other hand, is a follower of Srimad Bhagavadgita (“Cast off this petty faint-heartedness and wake up O vanquisher of foes” I.3)2 too without knowing it. Both of them are possessed by a quasi-religious inhibition of not taking up knife to take life and Hamlet and Srimad Bhagavadgita trace how their respective heroes get reconciled to their respective inhibitions. In the opening scene of Hamlet, the prince is sad at heart – a sadness that has some sort of an inverse connection with Shakespeare’s ‘tragic loss of a beloved son’. He has sensed that his father has been assassinated. Like Arjuna, Hamlet is possessed by an “obstinate condolment” (1. 1. 93) and “unmanly grief” (1. 1. 94). Irresolute, paralysed in will, unhealthy, morbid, neurotic, a dreamer, Hamlet is “a very disturbing figure in the context of western ideologies that value man of decision and action” (Foakes 290). Hamlet has been dubbed as “sensitive, intellectual, and feminine” (French 158, Foakes 24-26, Thompson and Taylor 42-50). Doubtful about the “commandment” (1.5.102) of the “questionable Ghost” (Foakes 287) and at heart disinterested in revenge, Hamlet is reluctant to kill his uncle because he will involve himself in the same sin as committed by the latter. Like Arjuna who was goaded into action by his good angel, the Divine Charioteer, Hamlet too was urged by his father-spirit to act. This pattern is tacitly operative from the first act of Hamlet. Both the heroes question the efficacy of killing kinsmen for mere worldly benefit. Arjuna was reminded by his ‘good angel’ of his duty as a member of the warrior-class whose duty it is to raise a righteous war for the restoration of virtue and peace in the realm. Arjuna was reminded that his sadness and reluctance emanates from a deep–rooted “delusion” – an incapacity to look beyond. Hamlet was also reminded of his duty as the prince of Denmark and as a son of the father who has been wronged. Hamlet’s reaction to the Ghost was like a “religious Conversion” (Alexander 45-46). Both of them learn the lesson that one can attain integrity only by discharging one’s avowed duty. By neglecting his avowed duty man degrades himself. One is struck by the fertile nature of their sadness. It is remarkable that Arjuna’s dejection has been called “Yoga”. It is a kind of aided and creative dejection that leads one to reflect upon and realize the fundamental truths of life and existence. Hamlet’s dejection is equally creative and poetic. Hamlet himself hints at the “particular” nature of his own melancholy (“I have that within which passes show” 1. 1.85) cast of mind when he says that the external aspects of grief fail to “denote me truly” (1. 1. 83). Claudius refers to Hamlet’s sorrows as “clouds that still hang on you” (1. 1. 65). To Polonius Hamlet’s melancholia is “pregnant sometimes” (2. 2. 203). It is a sorrow in which there is a “happiness that often madness hits on” (2. 2. 204). It is a state of mind from which there arise some questions which do not come from “reason and sanity” (2. 2. 205). Claudius says – There is something in his (Hamlet) soul O’ver which his melancholy sits on brood. (3. 1. 159)

2 Srimad Bhagavadgita . Ed. Swami Ramsukhdas. Gorakhpur: Gita Press, 2010 (Reprint). Print. has been followed throughout for textual references.

The biblical image of brooding has something to do with the ‘pregnant’ nature of Hamlet’s melancholy. There is“bravery” in the grief of both Arjuna and Hamlet. The world-weariness of both Hamlet and Arjuna is worth discussing. Hamlet says – How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! (1. 2. 133-134).

Hamlet deems this world to be an “unweeded garden/That grows to seed.” He thinks in terms of Satyr, grotesque, hybrid, half-human creatures who attend on Dionysus. It will not be irrelevant to say in this context that the classical references in the play are not merely fortuitous but are integrated into the Christian heart of the play. As Foakes says that in Hamlet “classical contextualization goes deeper” (290). It is also significant that Arjuna thinks in terms of how ‘hybrids’ (‘Varnasankarah’) are born when “the women of a family become perverse” (I, 41). Hamlet, on the other hand, can’t pardon his mother for making “the royal bed of Denmark” a “couch for luxury and damned incest” (I.5.83). Hamlet too is opposed to the idea of ‘mixing’ “thy commandment” with “baser matter” (I.5.104). Hamlet thinks in terms of baked pies for the funeral (Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the funeral bak’d-meats/ Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables 1. 2. 180- 181). Arjuna also thinks in terms of ritual offerings of rice-balls and water offered to the deceased at the funeral rites. He is of the opinion that “Varna Sankarah” or bastards lead the family line towards hell. The popular meaning of the term “Varna Sankarah” is a mixture of castes. But the connotation of the word is “a mixture of the contrary and irreconcilable elements”. Both Arjuna and Hamlet denounce the mixture of contraries – an incestuous mixture traceable in the relationship between Gertrude and Claudius. The Ghost of King Hamlet describes Claudius as “incestuous” (“damneed incest” 1.5.83), “adulterate” and full of “shameful lust”. It hates Claudius’s marriage as “damned incest” (1. 5. 84). It is weary of the ways of the world. The earth seems to Hamlet “a sterile promontory”. It is a weariness that looks upon ‘god-like’ man as “quintessence of dust”. He is fed up with the vagaries of the world – “scorns of time”, “oppressor’s wrong”, “disprized love”, “law’s delay”, “insolence of office” (3. 1. 70-73) and so on. The most remarkable aspect of the thematic connection between the two texts lies in the fact that their respective heroes are ultimately reconciled to the ‘war’ within. What Arjuna learns during his conversation with the Divine Charioteer is the essence of Pure Reality, as that which is wholly beyond change in nature and the nature-born things and is even eternally immutable and uniform in the midst of the flux in space, time, things, beings and circumstances. Real essence is ever-present in each man, whenever and however, he is. But that is not realized because of ‘attachment and aversion’ – born of the changeable nature of things in a person. Only on achieving complete freedom from attachment and aversion, it is automatically realized (Ramsukhdas IX-X). This is true of both Arjuna and Hamlet. Both Srimad Bhagavadgita and Hamlet trace how the ‘seeker’ becomes ‘seer’. Arjuna sheds his melancholy and inaction because he is convinced of the inevitability of action. Arjuna plunges into an action in which there is little element of personal desire. It is our desire that blurs our vision. An action without an element of desire enables us to see beyond. This is precisely what Hamlet achieves too towards the end of the play.

At last he involves himself in an action which transcends ‘attachment’ and it elevates Hamlet from the status of an avenger to a man capable of self-less action. He becomes the agent of a course of action already determined. Thus a ‘doer’ becomes a ‘seer’. Hamlet attains to a desireless transcendental state which, according to Indian scriptures, is “nirvikalpa avastha” (Ramsukhdas XIV). In order to understand “nirvikalpa avastha” one has to understand the nature of the paths for supreme realization. There are three paths – of Action, of Knowledge and of Devotion. There are three related bodies – the gross, the subtle and the causal. To employ the three bodies in self-less service is the path of action. In order to accomplish these yogas and attain one’s salvation, man has to be endowed with three powers – power to act (strength), power to know (knowledge) and power to believe (faith). Both Hamlet and Arjuna set out by choosing the path of action but fail to act on account of some haziness of vision. They are dominated by an interest in action, but do not know the paradox of the relation between the self and action. Arjuna mistakenly feels that it is upon his action that the life and death of his relatives depend. He fails to recognize that even his own action is a kind of merging of the will in the will of someone who assigns action to everyone. Hamlet also becomes egotistical. He feels that it is upon his action that the state of Denmark depends and that he can set right the fissures of time. Hamlet’s “noble and most sovereign reason” (3. 1. 151) is rather, like a jangled bell, “out of time and harsh” (3. 1. 152). Thus his ‘inaction’ is not the outcome of “weakness of character” (Dover Wilson), or “fatal aestheticism” (Nevo 162), or an inhibition as to the “inescapable condition of man” (Mack). But lack of proper understanding of what he is about to do is the chief reason behind his “crawling between earth and heaven” (3. 1. 125). It is in the grave-digger scene and thereafter that truth begins to dawn upon Hamlet. That Hamlet was en route to his final realization was hinted at when he desisted from killing Claudius while the latter was praying. It reminds us of the ‘kshatriya’ sprit of fighting on equal terms and ‘killing’ or ‘be killed’ in full cognizance and conscience. Like Arjuna who agrees to fight because he now understands the true meaning of action and has emerged wiser, Hamlet realizes the quintessence of dust – Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam (5. 1. 208-210)

He also alludes to “Imperious Caesar” who is “dead” and “turned to clay” (v.i.180). The implication is that his death is as insignificant as the death of any great man. When challenged by Laertes, Hamlet is quite composed and is no longer “splenitive and rash” (5. 1. 28). Hamlet has now understood that our actions, however heroic they may seem, can hardly change the scheme of things– Let Hercules himself do what he may The cat will mew, and dog will have his day. (5. 1. 228-230)

It is to Horatio that Hamlet unravels the best jewel of his newly developed understanding. He says that in his mind there ‘was’ a kind of ‘fighting’ which is over. “He abandons all of his earlier wrestlings with conscience and with the biblical injunction against killing” says Foakes (297). He now understands that “there is a

59 divinity that shapes our ends” (5. 2. 8-11). He now learns to be worthy of his new- found calling by taking up arms and being the instrument of providence. This does not surprise us because Shakespeare has kept his readers prepared for this development by referring to both classical (e.g. Hyperion, Jupiter, Mercury, Hercules) and Christian figures (e.g. Cain, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us! 1.4.39) many times in the play and by ‘combining’ and ‘reconciling’ his Renaissance conception of man with the Medieval Heaven-centric views at times (e.g. “. . . how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god!”) . From the very beginning Shakespeare has been alluding to Heaven, Hell (“sulphurous and tormenting flames”) and Purgatory (“burnt and purged away”).The ‘commandment’ of the Ghost is more ‘a mission’ than ‘a commission’ and Hamlet’s reaction to the Ghost is “like a religious conversion’ (Edwards, 39,45) . Alexander goes to the extent of saying that though the Ghost exhorts Hamlet to kill, it “denounces the idea of revenge killing” (45-46). The plethora of Christian references in the play provokes us to imagine whether the writing desk of the “world’s greatest lender” (Tobin 14) was littered with the “bibles, both Bishop’s and Geneva” (Tobin 11). I sometimes dare wonder whether Shakespeare used to read a translated version of the Srimad Bhagavadgita along with “the Genesis, the Gospel of St. Matthew, and the book of Revelation” (Tobin 11). Even Hamlet’s fatalistic attitude revealed itself when Hamlet thought of himself as subject to the “slings and arrows” of “outrageous Fortune”. He understands that there is a higher power in control of us, directing us towards our destination. This recognition drastically modifies Hamlet’s earlier assessment of his freedom of action and power to direct his own course. This is a significant development in Hamlet. He feels the presence of the guiding hand of heaven in his own impulsive and unpremeditated actions. He learns to question the utility of man’s “willed efforts” and is convinced of its futility. Man’s free will is limited. What is required of man is ‘good will’ which has no opposition with ‘god-will’. It is his final realization of the need of doing a work without attachment that enables Hamlet to look beyond. At the end of the play Hamlet is not inclined to take revenge. He has forgotten all enmity and begs forgiveness from Laertus. He is capable of doing this not only because by the ‘image’ of his ‘cause’ (5. 2. 76) he sees the ‘portraiture of Laertus’ but also because he has learnt to shed his ego and ascribe all his actions to ‘someone’ above us. The phrase “my cause” needs to be elaborated. By ‘my cause’ Hamlet does not mean to say merely that Laertus is driven by a similar urge for revenge. “My cause” does not mean vengeance. Hamlet believes that there is little resemblance between his partly-accidental killing of Polonius, Laertus’ father and Claudius’ premeditated assassination of King Hamlet, father of Prince Hamlet. As because his conscience is clear and integrity is maintained, Hamlet does not recognize himself as a proposed victim of Laertus. But Hamlet knows that Laertus has been unhinged by sorrow. He forgives Laertus because, like him, he is also a bereaved son. But Hamlet, very much like Arjuna in Srimad Bhagavadgita who threw arrow at the feet of his superiors in the enemy camp with a view to seeking their blessings, regains the right attitude towards his enemy. He ‘praises’ his enemy, Laertus, sincerely. He believes that all occurrences show God’s immediate concern and control. He would therefore ‘accept’ and ‘invite’ the circumstance which present themselves and not try to avoid them. He finds special providence (i.e. divine intervention) in such an insignificant matter as “the fall of sparrow” (an allusion to

Matthew 10.29). What is important to him is ‘readiness’. “Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be” says Hamlet (5. 2. 195). Laertus, Hamlet’s erstwhile adversary and now turned into Hamlet’s alter-ego, seems to echo Hamlet’s realization – Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee, Nor thine on me. (5. 2. 308-310)

Hamlet’s response is equally significant –

Heaven make thee of it. I follow thee (5.2.311)

Hamlet has attained to such a state of understanding that he dies ‘satisfied’. His action is now self-less. This, according to Srimad Bhagavadgita , is “Niskam – karma”. He calls death a ‘felicity’. Foakes terms it as “resigning himself to providence”. In my opinion it is more than that. I would prefer the terms “reordering”, “rejuvenating” and “readying” of the self. The word “resigning” smacks of morbid helpnessness. This sort of reconciliation with death is not to be confused with the death wish of the poets through the ages. There is no nightingale’s lure here. It dawns from a rich understanding of the eternal cycle of life and death. Hamlet now feels that there is life after death in ‘heaven’. The truth about which Srimad Bhagavadgita is so eloquent – the soul is not slain even when the body is – dawns upon Hamlet. To him revenge becomes secondary. Hamlet is at last freed of his ‘diseased conscience’ – a freedom loved by any man, Pagan or Christian, Indian or Danish.

Works Cited 1. Tobin, J.J.M. “Shakespeare’s Life”. Introduction. Hamlet. Ed. Tobin. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2012. 3-14. Print. 2. Ramsukhdas, Swami. “Glory Of Gita”. Introduction. Srimad BhagavadGita. Ed. Ramsukhdas. Gorakhpur: Gita P, 2010 . Print. 3. Foakes, R.A. “Hamlet’s Neglect of Revenge”. Critical Responses. Hamlet. Ed. Tobin. Boston: Cengage Learning,2012. 287-303. Print. 4. Nevo, Ruth. Tragic Form in Shakespeare. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Print. 5. Thompson, Ann and Neil Taylor. William Shakespeare: Hamlet. Plymouth: Northcote House in Association with the British council, 1996. Print. 6. French, Marilyn. Shakespeare’s Division of Experience. New York: Summit Books, 1981. Print. 7. Alexander, R.N. Poison, Play and Duel. London: Routledge, 1971. Print. 8. Edwards, Philip. Ed. Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Print.

Arun Joshi’s The Apprentice : A Study of Awakened Conscience

Mrs Sunita Tiwari

Arun Joshi is a novelist writing in contemporary context. His novels deal with the socio cultural problems of India after independence. He notices the collapse of the age-old values resulting in the disjoined, purposeless and absurd universe. He has portrayed the evils of materialism, cynicism, escapism and man’s search for identity. Arun Joshi finds the world full of exploitation, resulting in chaos, confusion and anarchy. Man is totally frustrated and alienated because of being separated from his fellow beings. The writer is pained to see such a situation. He has tried to provide a solution to this by delving deep into Indian philosophy. Vedanta philosophy, the teachings of the Gita and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi have great influence on Arun Joshi. He strongly believes that an individual’s actions have effect on others and on oneself. He reveals a world where man is confronted by the self and the questions of his existence. His search is directed to the recesses of human psyche and he emerges as a great artist of psychological insight. Arun Joshi has withdrawn from the outer world to the inner world to explore the problems of human existence. He probes deeper into the diverse facets of crises in modern man’s life. Joshi is aware of man’s feeling of anxiety and alienation. They are the steps in the quest for a meaning in life. As a novelist his primary concern is with the efforts of an anguished man to find moorings for himself in the tumultuous sea of life. In The Apperentice Joshi delineates the agonising predicament of his protagonist, Ratan Rathore, who is lost in the world full of chaos, corruption, hypocrisy and absurdity. He becomes an existential character, being alienated from his self as well as his surroundings. He uses the confessional tone and exemplifies the doctrine that man’s salvation depends on the course of life he chooses to follow. Ratan Rathore is both the hero and anti hero of the novel. He probes into his inner life and accepts the weaknesses of his character. He sees himself as chicken hearted and is repulsed by the degeneration of his character. He is a man of the practical world, pragmatic to the core; he rises in hierarchy by making deals and flattering the bosses. As he comes face to face to face with the social reality he conforms to the phoney social norms. He finds his freedom in his choice which is the essence of life. He is torn between the two conflicting choices being the son of an idealistic, patriotic father and a very practical mother. He wants to live a life like his father, but soon his dreams are shattered and idealism dissipated. Struggle for a job confronts him with reality of life; the honour of being a son of a freedom fighter is of no practical purpose. Wherever he goes he is “examined, interviewed, interrogated and rejected” (29).He realises that though the posts are advertised they are filled by people who are preselected. Thus begins his life as an apprentice clerk. He works hard to please his Superintendent, ‘harder than almost anybody in the department except the Superintendent himself’ (35).His journey in the office begins and further corruption of his soul is just a matter of time. He becomes out and out a man of the world, thoroughly possessed by the social and cultural drives- totally alienated from

62 and dispossessed of his genuine self of sincerity of existence and purity of existence. He betrays his colleagues for a promise of confirmation of his job from his bosses. He further loses his identity with his promise to marry his boss’s niece. His downfall is very smooth, cunning, deceptive and easygoing. Ratan represents the modern generation in which people feel desensitized and experience the gradual erosion of the moral fabric of society, self interest replaces sacrifice, fraud and deception replace honesty, corrupt manoeuvres replace courage and morality. Ratan undergoes conflict of mind in choosing between the higher ideals of his father and his instinct to survive in the modern world. He exercises his choice to pursue his material ends on the Sartrean line of existentialistic ideology. His hypocrisy knows no bounds. The tragedy is that he is sinking into the abyss of darkness of corruption, exploitation and bourgeois filth and yet thinks that he is swimming. As he confesses: ‘We sink and we think we are swimming’ (53). But this does not go on for long. The war is lost. Ratan had taken enormous bribe for the clearance of sub standard war material meant for the front. The Brigadier, Ratan’s childhood friend suffers a nervous breakdown on return from war. He is admitted to a hospital. Ratan feels the pain and suffering of another person when he meets him. Brigadier is held responsible of connivance in the supply of defective war material as he deserts his post. He has to face a court martial. Ratan is asked by the Superintendent of Police to confess his crime and save his friend. Ratan could not muster the courage to confess.The Brigadier is a true and best friend of Ratan. He had once saved his life when he was attacked by hooligans. Brigadier is a strong man but he falls to pieces on the false charges against him and shoots himself. Ratan thinks that he is not an ordinary criminal but a martyr who is ‘expected to make amends to redress the terrible wrong that he had inflicted on so many men’ (114).He is in great stress and mental agony. He tries to confess but is not able to do so due to shame and fear. Ratan views his misdeeds as ‘little adulteries of the soul that did not count’ (117). He becomes alien to himself with the news of death of Brigadier. His existence is tormented by the question, ‘Why did I take bribe?’ (61). Though he consoles himself by seeing that all the ministers ‘ secretaries and officials are neck deep in corruption, he is worried about the sharp slump in morality of people. This existential dimension is made clear with this conflict in his mind. He is finally responsible for his deeds as he betrays his conscience. Ratan becomes a typical modern man and his self betrayal leads him to a feeling of being a non entity. Ratan is lost in the dark labyrinth of life. He always wants to do the right thing, yet fails. Depressed and frustrated, he interprets life in terms of algebra where it is equated to those complex sums ,all directed at finding the missing element which is related and interrelated with each other. He humbly acknowledges his responsibility. Arun Joshi has expressed his views in an interview, ‘Individual actions have effects on others and one. So one cannot afford to continue with an irresponsible existence but has to commit oneself at some point’ (Bannerji: IV).After painful soul churning he comes to know that the real culprit is none other than himself. ‘To know good and to know evil and to choose evil... Who does this choosing but ourselves’ (142). Despite the chaotic situation, the choice lies with the individual and when one chooses evil, it boomerangs. The writer has solved the problems of life with the teachings of Gandhi. Ratan follows the way of Bhakti for the purification of soul. Every morning before going to office, he goes to the temple,

63 wipes shoes of the congregation and begs forgiveness of all those he had harmed, deliberately or unwittingly. This act purges him of his vanity. He does believe this symbolic act of penance will bring him an absolute humility and genial acceptance of life. His sitting in front of temple signifies his devotion in which the devotee can appease his God by praying. He does not enter the temple but sits outside on the stairs to wipe the shoes. He now starts to live his life on the thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi and the Bhagavad Gita.He undergoes expiation and believes that purification of his soul is obtained not by rituals but by making amends. He tries to get rid of bourgeois filth that had settled on him all through his career. The sense of evil in Ratan torments him and forces him to repent for all that he had done. In the end he understands the value of his father’s word. Joshi uses the dictum of Gita and Laws of Karma to resolve the dilemma of the protagonist. Ratan evolves into a karmayogi after the realisation of his sin and overcomes despair and alienation. He reaches his affirmation in his apprenticeship as he knows his life may be zero but not necessarily purposeless. The novelist helps his protagonist to overcome self estrangement and social alienation by making him metaphysically involved in the matters of the world. It may be late for him but Ratan continues his struggle. He is positive and re- establishes faith in life. The novel ends with a dawn which is symbolic of regeneration. The greatness of the novelist resides in his having added a social dimension to this novel through his moralistic vision of responsible existence.

Works cited

1. Joshi, Arun. The Apperentice, New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1993. 2. Bannerji, Purabi. “A Winner’s Secrets”, Interview, The Sunday Statesman (February 27, 1983).

Self-interest: The Real Guide in R.K.Narayan’s The Guide

Satyaranjan Das

In R.K.Narayan’s The Guide Raju’s statement under the veil of mock-humility ‘I’m but an instrument accepting guidance myself’(46), if taken seriously, could expose for the readers the hollowness of the guide identity of him who only poses as a guide in different phases of his life. He just filled the vacant situations, which the people around tempted him to do. He was not at all qualified to guide the tourists, Rosie or the gullible villagers of Mangala. Narayan’s ironic use of the title is very significant. If there is any guide in the novel, I think, it is rather the desire to satisfy the self or the desire of self-preservation on the part of the persons who wanted Raju, the fake guide to guide them. They were not initially guided by Raju; but Raju was directed by them or rather their desire to satisfy themselves. At the same time Raju’s own urge for self gratification led him to be a guide. There are some carelessly drawn images of the strong urge for self gratification or self-preservation, scattered here and there; they demand our attention.

The tourists were a class of self-conscious, educated people financially more or less able with interest to know the unknown, to see the unseen - to enjoy themselves. The man stretching himself under the awning on the platform of Raju’s shop and spending the night that way or ‘the man who had gone to the source of the river [and] spoke all night about it’(57) may be taken to be images of tourists with strong urge for self-gratification. They travelled by train and motor car, some of them were very much interested to take snaps with their camera; they were interested not only in the scenic beauty, they also watched the trapping of an elephant herd or a tiger, even wanted to shoot a tiger. There is “the bungalow on top of Mempi with all- glass sides from where you could see a hundred miles and observe wild game prowling around” (62). Raju found some who were poets to watch nature and others who would enjoy nature and at the same time drink. There were also those who brought women there. These merry making fellows were badly in need of a guide. So their urge for enjoyment made a guide out of Raju the shopkeeper. With his titbits of knowledge gained from scraps he managed his profession. In fact, he had little idea about tourism; he admits later his lack of knowledge or bent of mind to be a tourist guide: “Why anyone should want to forgo food and comfort and jolt a hundred odd miles to see some place, I could never understand …It seemed to me silly to go a hundred miles to see the source of Sarayu when it had taken the trouble to tumble down the mountain and come to our door. I had not even heard of its source till that moment…” (57). He gave statistics out of his head to an innocent man. Whether the dome of a shrine was built in the third century B.C or the style of drapery indicated the third century - it was all the same to Raju. He even varied the information about the same thing ‘according to the mood of the hour’. Though he took his tourists to watch elephants, he found no interest in elephants. A knowledgeable tourist always

65 exposed Raju’s disqualification. “What is the use of your calling yourself a guide if you do not know…?”(63)

Rosie had a tremendous urge to dance Bharat Natyam which she inherited from her Devdasi tradition. We find the image of Rosie with a strong urge for self- expression, raising her foot and letting it down with a jingling sound, performing in tune with a song from an ancient Sanskrit composition of a lover and lass on the banks of Jamuna when Raju ‘could see, through her effort, the magnificence of the composition, its symbolism …’ (125). Raju thinks: “When she indicated the lotus with her fingers, you could almost hear the ripple of water around it”(125). He viewed her as ‘a pure abstraction’. Dream of self-expression and self gratification made her embrace Raju in ecstasy as she thought that it was Raju who gave her a new lease of life. The urge for self-assertion was evident in her plea before Marco: “I think I’d be very happy if I could do that. I have so many ideas. I’d like to try. Just as you are trying to . . .” (147). She solicited help from Raju only because she took Raju’s interest in art to be serious and she underestimated her ability to manage herself. Raju had little contribution to the making of Nalini – the illustrious Bharat Natyam dancer. He provided her only with the place in the mud hut where she practiced for some months. He proposed to Rosie that she should adopt such a name as would suit the classical dance. And the third thing Raju did was to introduce Nalini in the annual social of Albert Mission College. But Rosie’s urge for self- assertion coupled with her passion for art could find itself expressed without this much help. Raju’s presence in the story of Rosie’s soaring was just incidental. Even Raju admits: “At that time I was puffed up with the thought I had made her. I am now disposed to think even Marco could not have suppressed her permanently; sometime she was bound to break out and make her way”(182). He admits in a similar vein: “I became known because I went about with her, not the other way round”(182). From the time when the Secretary and Treasurer of the union of Albert Mission College came to Rosie to see a little bit of her art Raju found her ‘taking charge of their programme’ (179) very serious about and careful of the conditions for building up her programme. When he ventures to ‘beat time with his hands like a very knowing one’(179), she forbids.

In the last phase of Raju’s life as a guide near Mangala the villagers badly need a Swami in their life full of misery and problems and despairs. The individual need of Velan as well as the social need for solution of problems and self- preservation project Raju seated before an ancient temple on the bank of Sarayu as a mythical guru with ‘moral qualities such as good will and readiness to help’(Guerin et al 163). Velan sitting ‘two steps below the granite slab on which Raju was sitting cross-legged as if it were a throne, beside an ancient shrine’ (5) ‘gazing reverentially on his face’ or the same man placing before him a basket filled with bananas, cucumbers, pieces of sugar-cane, fried nuts, and a copper vessel brimming with milk may be taken to be images of a gullible Indian looking for some saint doing miracles and providing guidance in life. There is no opportunistic attitude in the action; but an element of self-interest is not absent altogether. Here is the simple logic of the myth- loving mind of a tradition-bound Indian village: “We dig the land and mind the cattle - so far so good, but how can we think philosophies? Not our line, master. It is

66 possible. It is wise persons like your good self who should think for us”(52). They shift the burden of thinking philosophies, doing miracles and turning their despairs into optimism to the guru. They are there to offer naivedyas and devotion. Whatever Raju has uttered is taken to be expression of great wisdom or to possess a miraculous power. It started with Velan’s sister’s compliance in the matter of her marriage; then whatever good happens has been interpreted to have happened under the influence of the holy man.

On Raju’s own part what guided him or made him a guide is, again, his urge to satisfy his self - his ego and his luxurious self. He has been occupied in self gratification except for a few days in the last phase of his life. We find in him representation of the Indian middle class individuals of the mid-twentieth century when ‘their traditional codes and hierarchies have become fragmented and private, so that no man can any longer fulfil himself in a traditional way’ (qtd. in Sen 161). Krishna Sen refers to Kirpal who observes that Raju had been “guilty of upsetting [through] excessive pursuit of kama and artha” (30). If we read Raju’s life in the light of Hindu theology, the working of mada or ahamkara in his fevered pursuit of material success should also be focussed.

In his childhood Raju had a life of sensuous pleasures –the pleasures of the palate captured in the image of sugar ‘kept in an old tin can’ or the pleasures of the other senses represented through the image of his journey to the town by a cart enjoying the sound of the bells around the bull’s neck and enjoying all the scenes in passing. Though this hunger for innocent pleasures gives way to the urge for the pleasure of self-assertion in the new world of Malgudi differentiated from the traditional one by the advent of railway, his appetite of the palate lurks here and there all through his life.

Raju played the whole day under the shade of the tamarind tree which may be seen as an epitome of the old world India. One day the idyllic setting is disrupted by the trucks parked there which brought red earth for the railway which brought the traditional life, society, economy under the prospect of change. Raju’s frowning and driving away of the cowherd from the spot where he had been playing is, as if, emblematic of his self assertion: “I was beginning to have a sense of ownership of the railway, and I didn’t want trespassers there”(24). He took charge of the railway stall and handled the affair efficiently. But “selling bread and biscuits and accepting money in exchange seemed to [him]…a tame occupation”(48). He felt that he was ‘too good for the task’(48). He was not satisfied with the humble job, earning his livelihood. He began to develop new lines by stocking old magazines and dealing in schoolbooks. Old books and all kinds of printed stuff catering to the school and college students took the place of coconuts. He started to equip his mind by reading ‘a certain amount of good stuff’ in his stall. He liked to talk to people of the new India – the school and college students and railway passengers. He also loved to hear them speak. But the subjects of conversation were found to be changed from those of ‘the state of crops, price of commodities, and litigation’ which attracted Raju’s father and his customers. The community feeling among Raju’s father- the shopkeeper of the hut shop and his customers was now lost. With his death the hut shop was closed

67 by Raju. The customers who came for something to eat or smoke or for a chat about ‘the price of grain, rainfall, harvest, and the state of irrigation channels’ or old litigations ‘wilted away and disappeared’(48). All these indicated the birth of a new Malgudi – a new India. Boys here pursued their studies in Mission College, people traveled by train, a good number of them got interested in pleasure trips to places or trips of devotional or historical interest. Raju found a new job in this world. Raju observes: “It is written on the brow of some that they shall not be left alone. I am one such, I think. Although I never looked for acquaintances, they somehow came looking for me”(55). But if people came looking for him, he himself sort of encouraged them by providing information in spite of knowing nothing about the things. He rationalizes his action by saying that he wanted to be ‘pleasant’(55). But actually he wanted to gain importance from the people. On the request of the tourists to help he did not refuse and on the way did not care for his business in the stall. To uphold himself as a full-blown tourist guide he provided the particulars about things of historical interest; fidelity to facts was not at all important to him. He was elated as people attached importance to him: “People come asking for me from Bombay, Madras, and other places, hundreds of miles away. They call me Railway Raju and have told me that even in Lucknow there are persons who are familiar with my name. It is something to become so famous, isn’t it, instead of handing out matches and tobacco?”(59) But it was not possible for his mother, an old woman, to realise the new demands of individualism in the new world. Krishna Sen points to “his prioritizing of the demands of the self over those of tradition and society, his preference for money and influence (symbols of individuation and self-assertion) over the claims of caste and family, his commodification of cultural forms as in his setting up Bharat Natyam as an “art business” (162) or faking the role of a sanyasi for personal gain, and especially his easy switching of roles from shopkeeper all the way to swami (unfettered by the limitations of caste or class) ” (112).

In the second act in the drama of his self-gratification Raju was in pursuit of kama first and then artha and mada. From the very first sight he was in love for Rosie, Marco’s wife, who appeared to him to be a ‘divine creature’ ‘lovely and elegant’, ‘a vision’. He waxes poetic in recollecting the memory of that woman. His whisper close to her face gave vent to his feelings: “…life is so blank without your presence.”(73) He pays compliments in hyperbolic terms: “All night I didn’t sleep…The way you danced, your form and figure haunted me all night.”(72) He ‘sandwiched’ his love between his ‘appreciations of her art’. Raju in close proximity with Rosie in darkness waiting for games from glass veranda is an image of one excited with the feeling of love. “Oh, the whispers, the stars, and the darkness—I began to breathe heavily with excitement.” (79) Raju’s waxing lyrical at the sight of purple play of colour in the sky, his sitting with a bowed head under a reeling sensation caused by a touch of Rosie’s hand, his pinning the silver brooch on her sari are scattered images of love intoxicated. The husband’s callous indifference towards her gave Raju an opportunity to please her by providing her what the husband had never given her. He took her all over Malgudi for outing, shopping, dining in the hotel, seeing a cinema. Naturally she enjoyed too much; she was ‘excited, thrilled, appreciative of everything’. ‘This was probably the first time she was seeing the world. She was in ecstasies… Her eyes sparkled with vivacity and gratitude’(87-88).

They were entangled in an illicit relationship. For Raju: “The only reality in my life and consciousness was Rosie”(118).After the first flush of eroticism was over, Rosie became morose. She was pricked by her conscience in her relationship with Raju and, again, she could not be happy with her husband who was busy with the cold, old stone walls of the caves and could not satisfy her. Actually she ‘herself was a dreamer if ever there was one. She would have greatly benefited by a husband who could care for her career…’ (113). On her slightest mention he promised her the greatest service he could render. He helped her to day-dream. He ‘found out the clue to her affection and utilized it to the utmost’(122).It was for his promise to fulfill her dream that Rosie returned to Raju after Marco had left her. But though in the hotel room once Rosie appeared to be an abstraction in her absolute identification with art, more often than not what he watched of her dance during practice in the mud house of theirs were the curves that tempted him to hug her(163).Whenever he watched her sway her figure, he wanted to interrupt her. The commercial prospect of her dance was, however, in his head. He thought of her as a ‘gold-mine’ and Bharat Natyam as the greatest art business of the time(162) However, on Rosie’s persistent demands he desperately hunted for a lucky break. Once he could introduce Rosie on stage, rocket-like she soared. Now money poured in; Raju was now ensnared by artha. He utilized the opportunity to make money. Affluence led to luxury. They had a stylish two-storied house at New Extension and a car in keeping with the status of a celebrity. The house had a large compound, lawns, a garden and a garage. He engaged five musicians, a dance-master, a large staff of servants- a driver for the car, two gardeners for the garden, a Gurkha centry at the gate with a dagger at his waist, and two cooks. People came to see Raju by appointment. He jealously protected Rosie - his property: “I had a monopoly of her and nobody had anything to do with her” Fame brought money and power. “…my friendship was now sought after by others. I was on back-slapping term with two judges, four eminent politicians of the district whose ward could bring ten thousand votes at any moment for any cause, and two big textile-mill owners, a banker, a municipal councilor, and the editor of The Truth, a weekly…” (189). He liked to ‘hobnob’ with them and offered them coffee ‘because they were men of money or influence(189). He spent an enormous amount on servants and style. Coffee bill in their house amounted to three hundred rupees which was sufficient to maintain a middle class family in comfort. When Rosie expressed her fatigue with the same routine life, yearned for some relaxation, wondered about the use of so much of money, Raju thought differently: “It seemed absurd that we should earn less than the maximum we could manage…We needed all the money in the world. If I were less prosperous, who would care for me?”(195) He also planned big investments.

The image of egotistic Raju posing as an impresario is built up over a good many pages. In every show he occupied the middle sofa in the first row. He ‘gave it out that…unless [he]…sat there Nalini would be unable to perform’ (182). Again, “No show started until I nodded to the man peeping from the wings, and then the curtain went up. I never gave the signal until I satisfied myself that everything was set” (183). He mock-seriously enquired of the lighting, microphone arrangements and looked about as if to calculate ‘the velocity of the air, the strength of the ceiling’ and to consider ‘if the pillars would support the roof under the circumstances’ (183).

By all these false postures he ‘created a tenseness’ for the organizers who at the beginning of the performance heaved a sigh of relief for they had ‘achieved a difficult object’ and Raju thought that it would help Nalini’s career. He paid little attention to the crowd of visitors on the outer veranda of their stylish new house waiting all day to have a chance to speak to him: “Sometimes I observed through the glass window in the hall, how big a crowd waited for me outside, and I made a strategic exit through a side door …while the visitors looked on helplessly. I felt vastly superior to everyone”(188). He recollects his receiving the higher grade of visitors in the hall and his feeling of self-importance and power: “Sitting in that hall and looking around I had the satisfaction of feeling that I had arrived” (188). He ‘hugged a glass of whisky for hours’(196) to be an image of a man of influence –a ‘permit-holder’. Though prohibition law was in force for drinking in public, it was not for a man of influence of his stature. His power and influence gave him access to ‘what was going on behind the scenes in government, at the market, at Delhi, on the race course, and who was going to be who in the coming week’(196). He could ‘get a train reservation at a moment’s notice, relieve a man summoned to jury work… reinstate a dismissed official, get a man employed…and get an unpopular official shifted elsewhere…’(196). Intoxicated with such power he could not allow Rosie to slip away from him as she was the source of his power. This is why he did not let Rosie know about the magnanimity of Marco in sending him a copy of his epoch- making book with an acknowledgement of Raju’s services and more so in his sending the lawyer’s letter for releasing the jewellery box; as he was always anxious that she might change her mind and even return to her husband. Again, his blind pursuit of artha tempted him to forge her signature.

Raju in his urge for gaining self-importance is tempted to drift into the role of a swami at the very beginning. He can not ignore the respectful gaze of Velan. ‘The old habit of affording guidance to others’ asserted. “Ever since the moment this man had come and sat before him, gazing on his face, he had experienced a feeling of importance. He felt like an actor who was always expected to utter the right sentence” (14). Raju nodding his head in ‘a sudden access of pontificality’, narrating the story of great Buddha or Raju offering the basket of edibles at the feet of the image in the ancient shrine and narrating the story of Devaka are the images of a ‘master of the situation’- a fraud asserting his self-importance by posing as a great soul enlightening an inquiring mind. Starts another very dangerous act of posing as a guide on the part of Raju. Besides, his past haunts him; he cannot escape elsewhere. He can also utilize the opportunity to collect food for survival. What Raju does is only to utter some philosophic generalizations or platitudes or mystify his statements. He drags the innocent people ‘deeper and deeper into the bog of unclear thoughts’(52). His thirst for eminence makes him play the role he is put to or he himself opts for, with utmost of enthusiasm after he shakes the initial vacillation. “He decided to look as brilliant as he could manage, let drop gems of thought from his lip, assume all the radiance available, and afford them all the guidance they required without stint”(33-34). The omniscient narrator’s mocking tone steeped in irony runs ceaselessly: “He was surprised at the amount of wisdom welling from the depths of his being…He was hypnotized by his own voice; he felt himself growing in stature as he saw the upturned faces of the children shining in the half-light when he spoke. No

70 one was more impressed with the grandeur of the whole thing than Raju himself’(47). As adulation grows, he grows a beard to strike thoughtfully which would suit his spiritual status. When Raju’s two selves - the public and the private come to clash, “his tone hushed with real humility and fear; his manner was earnest”(109). The language loses its comic ironic edge. Thinking first of flying he is then ‘moved by the recollection of the big crowd of women and children touching his feet’(111). But the clash goes on. Raju takes meals without anybody’s knowledge. His confession brings Velan (as well the readers) to his true self. But the credulous disciple refuses to shake off his faith. He takes him to be another Valmiki – sinner- turned-saint. Raju finds no way to escape from the position to which he has carried himself day by day. He has to undertake the fast to appease rain god. On the second day of his fast he has no food to eat; but his private self hankers for it. He desperately sneaks in the temple to find if any bit of food is there, but in vain. He glares at Velan who has jeopardized his position and has had morbid and fantastic thoughts. At last the sight of Velan who has undertaken a sympathetic fast and is straining to give him as much comfort as possible to make the fast a success, makes him think of doing something seriously. He is dissatisfied with ‘persistence of food thoughts’. His bhogi self tries again and again to evade the ordeal; but he has to act under compulsion. There is the risk of being caught on the way if he tries to escape; there is the devotion of so many people – their expectation. “With a sort of vindictive resolution he told himself, “I’ll chase away all thought of food. For the next ten days I shall eradicate all thoughts of tongue and stomach from my mind”(237). In desperation he thinks: ‘If by avoiding food I should help the trees bloom, and the grass grow, why not do it thoroughly?’ (237)Even after ‘making an earnest effort’ for the first time, ‘learning the thrill of full application, outside money and love’ for the first time, ‘doing a thing in which he was not personally interested’ there is ambivalence in the novelist’s attitude towards the saint. He tells us that even on the fourth day the swami can make out the meaning of the smoke on the river bank. He even wonders what they may be eating. The sight torments him(234). Irony is not done with even in the interview with the American reporter. On the question “Er—for instance, have you always been a Yogi?’ the swami’s answer is: ‘Yes; more or less.’ Here is the implication that Raju as all through his life now also tries the option available and carries on with it ‘with relish and perfection’(Mukherjee 124).

The irony of the situation where a bhogi has turned into a yogi is accompanied by the irony in the images of self gratification on the river bank. The people coming to have a darshan of the Swami are engrossed in enjoyment of the funs of a picnic. Raju may discard his role of a bhogi denying the enjoyment of the pleasures of the senses, the sight-seeing public in festive dresses can not allow the opportunity of enjoying themselves slip away. Shops have sprung up displaying coloured soda bottles and bunches of bananas and coconut toffees. Tea Propaganda Board, pasting its posters all around the temple wall, also intends to utilize the opportunity to popularize the drinking of tea by serving free tea. The American reporter is engaged in a ridiculous interview to commodify the Swami’s fast as an Indian exotic show piece. This man represents media from the First World asserting himself in the affairs of the place. “He pushed everything aside and took charge of the scene. He looked about for only a moment, driving his jeep down to the hibiscus

71 bush behind the temple. He jumped off and strode past everyone to the pillared hall”(242). The throbbing of his generator ‘filled the place, overwhelming all other noises’(243). “It brought in a huge crowd of men, women, and children to watch the fun. All the other attractions in the camp became secondary”(243). The solemnity in the transformation of Raju is juxtaposed by the ridiculous extreme in the scene of the crowd of people fond of fun and sensation. “They climbed pillars and pedestals and clung to all sorts of places to reach positions of vantage”(243). Narayan has had dig at Government of India which has seized on the occasion to address the huge gathering to show their health consciousness documentaries, to publicize government development projects. They play popular hits on the gramophone to attract audience. Newspaper reporters have rushed to make hot news of the place which was totally neglected in spite of being drought-stricken until the startling news of the fast catches their attention. These people have no concern for the risk the Swami has braved. They are just the ploughman or the ship turning away from Icarus ‘disappearing into the green water’.

Raju may find his moksha personally in taking the fast seriously; but can it exert any influence on the lives of the thousands and millions of Indian people? Velan and some of his companions may be sympathetic and respectful for the Swami as they took him to be so from the moment they saw him or rather made him so themselves and the drought touched them closely. But for the others? They haven’t a mind to brood over the significance of the Swami’s fast; it is just an occasion for merrymaking. Narayan’s tone is quite ironic until only a few lines before the end of the novel. Even ‘the profoundest silence’ at the last moment may be interpreted as the silence of the tensed moments of the final over of a cricket match only to wait to see whether the Swami would succeed in bringing rains by his fast or not.

Works Cited

1. Guerin, Wilfred L.et al. ‘Mythological and Archetypal Approaches’, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature.New York:Oxford University Press,1999. Print. 2. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian 3. Novel in English. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 1971.Print. Narayan, R.K.The Guide (1958). Chennai: Indian Thought Publication, 2003.Print.

4. Sen, Krishna. Critical Essays on R. K. Narayan’s “The Guide”(First published by Orient Longman 2004).Kolkata: Orient Blackswan,2012. Print.

Responses to India- Naipaul, N.C.Chaudhuri, Rushdie and R.K.Narayan :A Comparative Study

Aloy Chand Biswas

Patrick French, Naipaul’s authorized biographer wrote his voluminous biography of Naipaul under a deceptive but appropriate title, suggested by Naipaul himself – The World As It Is. Patrick refers to his author’s cardinal honesty as a man as well as a writer who does not wish to suppress anything in his life, because he believes - the world cannot be changed to any different form from what it is. It is his adopted principle of writing for himself, no external substitute like an outrage against realities of life. He is not a writer of Rushdie’s élan of fact- fictionalizing trend. Fact is itself fictive if one cares to look it. Naipaul does so and his nascent fiction on the converted areas of Islam is as much so as on Indians living anywhere inside and outside India. So he could write his The Mimic Men and quote it in his Nobel Lecture. “The book was called The Mimic Men. And it was not about mimics. It was about colonial men mimicking the conditions of manhood, men who had grown to distrust everything about themselves” (‘Two Worlds’, The Nobel Lecture). His latest work AMasque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief is the presentation of such a world painted with a stroke of homour, which may pass over ordinary readers’ heads, but cannot escape the eye of a critic. Salman Rushdie presents Indians who are an amusing miscarriage. He is a story-teller of Arabian Nights – order basically in The Moor’s Last Sigh. He is more so in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Naipaul cannot write one so. His direction is different. To him every life is a story per se and he is inside that story, “I am the sum of my books” (‘Two Worlds’, The Nobel Lecture). He does not need to build it. Actually Naipaul is an Indian by birth and Rushdie is an Indian who knows India more than Naipaul does. When both of them are compared with N. C. Chaudhuri, the difference is striking. N. C. Chaudhuri is a man born and raised initially on the soft soil of the eastern part of riparian Bengal armed with a keen eye and a critical mind. All that he sees and knows – a good lot of India in relation to the west and all the strata of her political and cultural history and he brings them to bear upon a consolidated criticism in the whole series of his writings in Bengali and English. The writings are virtually a long string of autobiographical responses from beginning to end reared up by his unmoved personality. Chaudhuri is never a sharing shadow, never like Rushdie lost in his tales, never like Naipaul merging in A way in the World. He is ever consciously himself. His life is a continued judgment which Naipaul cannot be when he cherishes a sense of belongingness in a world which is what it is. He feels no use of refusing to be what he is. That is mainly why he resents those trying to be otherwise than what they are. Chaudhuri cannot allow them to betray the standard truth. Again Chaudhuri’s sense of humour is saddled too heavy to move about free. Judgement even trots his pace . Thy Hand, Great Anarch! is that book in which India is not in his cavalcade, neither a close follower in

73 an easy centre. On the otherhand Naipaul has no Canterbury in view, if he accompanies the pilgrims, he is not for a pilgrimage. Aziz accompanies him to the shrine on the hills of Northern India as a Muslim guide to a Hindu. When Naipaul could not keep himself steady in the vigorously eager onward thrust of pilgrims and fell back, his Muslim guide Aziz became mixed among the Hindu devotees, as if one of them, too eager to be graced by the sight of the Hindu god, the holy Lingam. Naipaul enjoyed it no less as did his guide. When compared to Rushdie’s lingam-worship in Grimus, it is a pilgrimage of different kind, meticulously made-up as an invented story. Characters are weird in their existence and participation and the world itself is eerie, though basically true. If Naipaul’s is fact-fiction, Rushdie’s is fiction-fact. Rushdie’s India in Midnight’s Children is pain in fact, but pleasure in fiction. The glorious moment of birth for the Nation as well as for all the children is a stark irony made amusingly fictional in form – Shiva-Shaleem swapped at birth, Parvati and Shiva proving a total mismatch, yet Shaleem appearing none-the-less in-between. India swapped at birth is a myth fictive as well as factitious. Naipaul’s art is deceptively elusive, yet it is as much as life is. Artless art is life which is Naipaul’s too. Therefore Aziz-Naipaul pilgrimage is a naked humour which is deceptive to that extent. True humour is truth revealed with an amusing subtlety of touches. It provides enjoyment not as a hilarious exuberance, but as enlightenment. Life itself is a great ground to Naipaul, therefore he does not require Rushdian myth of a satiric impatience and agony of child-birth just at the time of India’s wounded independence. Naipaul accounts for a ‘civilization wounded’ which does not require a myth, as his An Area of Darkness also does not, for darkness itself explains it. Naipaul’s art so to be called is not adopted, but self-evolved out of an urge that gave it a direction and defined its verve. Therefore Naipaul depicts India as ‘an area of darkness’, ‘a civilization wounded’ and also ‘a million mutinies now’, in a quite different way from what Chaudhuri presents and Rushdie rears up in so many stories he builds up with. Naipaul’s is apparently a traveller’s enquiring eye, a perceptive mind and finally with an amused interest in life around him. When it is India and Indians in their homeland and outside, it is more beguiling himself as an Indian outlandishly misplaced, a sort of diaspora-victim. In case of Nirad C. Chaudhuri it is never so, neither he is a fiction writer. He is a willing denizen of a city of England. India appeared to him poorly equipped to govern herself. He preferred for them a supervising rule with limited power of self-government. He has no amusing Indian story to sell. India is his land of Circe. He is not ready to revise his impression as was Naipaul on his subsequent visits to India . Naipaul came to India to be acquainted with his roots and his mood was nostalgic. Chaudhuri had no such reason to lend enchantment to the view. He had no illusion, so had no reason to be disillusioned. Chaudhuri had personal contact with Naipaul. He enjoyed a day’s hospitability at Naipaul’s residence, even in his absence. Patricia, his hostess paid no less care to her guest. No such close relationship Rushdie enjoyed with them. Their social affiliations are different and styles of writing are also different. The only common bond was India, though different in their responses to it. Chaudhuri’s is a benevolent critic’s role, whereas the other two are creatively poised. Rushdie’s Haroun’s father Rashid and Naipaul’s Willie Chandran are two different creations. Willie’s Ana is a close parellel to Naipaul’s Pat with their similar rootless position –

Willie directly from India, Naipaul from Trinidad Indians. Naipaul knew the style how to use the Indian rootlessness to a fascinating story, all real yet no less a story. This knowledge is out of an intense interest in how life is lived. He does not need criticism, for criticism is inherent in life itself. For Rushdie also, he cannot spoil the spell of his stories. It is he who only can show – a baby born Muslim swapped with one from Hindu passes well as good a Hindu as the other no less a Muslim. The irony is that yet India was partitioned on the basis of Hindu – Muslim nation theory. Rushdie’s is a satire too rollicking for those who were meant to be hurt. But he never means to hurt anybody. This is purely art.

Chaudhuri’s is history, but Naipaul’s is life. When it is India – specific, they two are co-lineal in approach, one abreast with history, the other with the life he knows along with what it reveals. Naipaul withholds criticism, Chaudhuri cannot. Chaudhuri’s judgement is individualistic and uncompromising, exactly not of order of Naipaul’s ‘the world as it is’. Chaudhuri’s ‘Civis Britannicus Sum’ which he produced in the dedication part of Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is a committed pledge, an echo of Roman history. Naipaul has no such commitment. He remains a rootless Indian. The vacuum Pat’s death created was filled up by a lady from the sub-continent. His wish to settle in India was frustrated. He was led by his human urge, diaspora which is also a human problem. Naipaul could never write a chapter ‘My Faith in Empires’, as it happens to Chaudhuri in Thy Hand, Great Anarch!. He wrote there : “………. I might say that to speak in favour of empires, including the British Empire in India in the 1980s, and living in England, would be like being a Lutheran in Old Spain with its Inquisition ……” (773). Naipaul’s is a realistic view. His history is confined to that extent as India appears to him ‘a wounded civilization’. Chaudhuri’s history records the rot which requires an Imperial expert to attend to heal. But what Naipaul means is that India’s wound is received as a weakling’s due and the weakening happens due to a long-drawn malnourishment. This sight is perhaps lost of Chaudhuri’s keen-eyed concentration. Chaudhuri was moved to passion at the sight of debris of Delhi- Tuglakabad, but he left out. He never felt for Vijayanagar and the last Mughal Bahadur Shah’s poem written in the last phase of Sepoy Mutiny, immediately before his captivity. He never felt curious about what the last Mughal wrote in it, as Naipaul did. Chaudhuri’s eulogy for empire is unqualified, where Naipaul’s is never. Howard Russell’s Mutiny memoir for once rouses Naipaul: It feels me with old nerves to contemplate Indian history, to see (perhaps with a degressive’s exaggeration, or a far-away colonial’s exaggeration) how close we were to cultural destitution, and to wonder at the many accidents which brought us to the concepts of law and freedom and wide human association – which gave men self- awareness and strength…..” (India : A Million Mutinies Now 98).

This sharing of India’s destiny is rare in Chaudhuri’s writings. Rather he is on the side of Empire as revealed in The Continent of Circe. His personal letter dated 11 Feb. 1946 to a London Daily ‘The Daily Telegraph’ is not what an Indian should have written :

But the people of India, if one considers their typical behaviours, do not act in this fashion. They are capable of creating and nursing grievances and drawing satisfaction from self-pity…… (Thy Hand, Great Anarch! 802).

Naipaul was never an Indian citizen. He came to India in 1962 to be acquainted with his roots. While paying a visit to the Dubeys’ village, though he came from a different world, yet he found something common with them. He found Yassodhara a fair link between Trinidad and Dubeys’ village – language almost the same, hospitality of the same awkward kind. Then women cared less for his glory, rather more for their kinship with his parents. Naipaul also did not feel ashamed of acknowledging them as his kins. Chaudhuri too did not fail to respond to the old neglected beauty on his Banaras- visit of the Buddhist sculpture of bygone age at Saranath.

Naipaul’s response is a kind of root-seeking and quite different from Chaudhuri’s approach. Root is not Chaudhuri’s concern, for he is not rootless. Chaudhuri’s so much insistence on history is given an egotistic glamour of infallible truth that there is hardly any scope for an amusing relaxation of humour except for a frisking of facts. A passage is here from Thy Hand, Great Anarch! to witness : Working everyday from the beginning of May, I had finished Chapter –2 of the second part of my autobiography (P.217 of the 1951 American edition), when my writing was interrupted by sudden outbreak of violence in Delhi in Sept. 1947. ….. (837). Naipaul’s mood is relaxed observation and his response is not critical reaction, rather enjoyment in intimations. India revealed herself to him at the moment he saw her. He clearly admits that he had seen India in her Trinidad version, then saw her at home and further beyond. Chadhuri’s position is different. He is an insider, born Indian and brought up too. His deep interest in history, armed with major Indian languages like Sanskrit and Bengali, could make his access easy to pre-10th century history of India and need not have been obsessively confined to India’s subjection to Empire. Why he did not do, it is difficult to understand, though an autobiographical interest prevails over all his writings and it sometimes appears egotistic in nature. Naipaul avoids Chaudhuri’s quibbling, as for example he calls Gandhiji India’s God, but Chaudhuri presents him : this homage is sub-rational, but it is respectable and, therefore, might be called supra-rational. To the masses of India, the actual is always crushing and frightening, and so, all their idealism and yearning for happiness find refuge in myths. There will be no time in the future history of the Hindus in which Mahatma Gandhi will not be remembered in this way. He has taken his place in our Pantheon. (Thy Hand, Great Anarch! 876)

Rushdie’s is neither direct nor quibbling, and adds a rider : but satiric as in his The Moor’s Last Sigh. He quotes a passage from R. K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma: Then Gandhi came and made everyone clap hands in rhythm over their heads and chant his favourite dhun: ….And there was Jai Krishna, Hare Krishna, Jai Govind,Hare Govind,there was Samb Sadashiv Samb Sadashiv Samb Sadashiv Samb Shiva Har Har Har Har…(The Moor’s Last Sigh 55).

What happened thereafter Rushdie ridicules the message the Mahatma carried to the people in such a language: ‘After all that’ Camoens told Belle on his return, ‘I heard nothing. I had seen India’s beauty in that crowd with its soda-water and cucumber but with that God stuff I got scared. In the city we are for secular India, but the village is for Ram....In the end I am afraid the villagers will march on the cities and people like us will have to lock our doors and there will come a Battering Ram’ (ibid 55-56). The fiction-writer Rushdie is a discord in criticism more than Chaudhuri’s personal criticism of Mahatma–led India. The three great writers of Indian blood took up India as their subject. It was quite natural that they knew India more than anything else, but their involvement with India is varied in degrees as well as in kinds. Chaudhuri lived in India for nearly seventy years and the other two live outside India among the Indians sometimes directly sometimes indirectly. Naipaul’s birth among indentured Trinidad Indians caste in his mind a strong West Indian impact. Rushdie’s high middle class family fell direct victim to the partition. Therefore different kinds of Indian life lived by the three writers directly or indirectly regulated their approach to India.

Naipaul’s is not Chaudhuri’s kind of mind. His is an artist’s criticism building up from his love for art. He avoids directness and his art intervenes to make everything emanate to the point of revelation. His humour is also a forte in artistic revelation. Naipaul wins as his Willie won Ana in Half a Life. Ana wrote how Willie’s book won her : At school we were told that it was important to read, but it is not easy for people of my background and I suppose yours to find books where we can see ourselves. ………. I feel I had to write to you because in your stories for the first time I find moments that are like moments in my own life, though the background and material are so different. It does my heart a lot of good to think that out there all these years there was someone thinking and feeling like me. (Half a Life 124) Naipaul won people who saw themselves in his books and shared a lot with him. Chaudhuri perhaps missed that chance. He could hardly get anybody to share his points of view. His egotistic style of presentation repulsed that last chance in India. Of these three writers on India, Chaudhuri knew more about India. For he mostly lived among the Indians, reacted and responded too. He spent half of his life in Bengal, yet he never felt at ease with the Bengalees. His shift from Kolkata to Delhi made to major change in his attitude to India. India’s Independence never gave him personal freedom for judgement. Therefore he remained a Catholic Pope so to speak in a Protestant land. Though Pope’s unsavoury satires made his people relish his literary works, Chaudhuri’s unsparing judgement could hardly make him enjoyable to his countrymen. His Autobiography of an Unknown Indian becomes a subject of strong criticism even among the Indians.

Naipaul and Rushdie are also autobiographical – Rushdie is a Partition- victim and Naipaul being ill-fatedly a West Indian. Any Indian living anywhere made Naipaul feel a bond of kingship, a healthy human limitation. It is their art that wins the readers’ hearts, yet leaves them free to detect. If it is judgement, willing

77 acceptance is to be awaited and cannot be enforced. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography is more an intellectual focus on life around, a judgement uncompromisingly compact. So, his old teacher Mohit Mazumdar who was his literary mentor assured Chaudhuri to send his critical assessment later –“But I have other anxieties besides the book and that is about your personal welfare or harm” (Thy Hand, Great Anarch! 911). Naipaul is not so worried about India. He is impressed by Aziz’s second generation, Nazir, an eighteen-year boy of good looks and a broader view of life. Again Naipaul’s views on ‘a million mutinies’ in India form a stable India in future.

Rushdie does not require such an extended hope for India. To him India is a land of stories. India breaks or builds no matter, it supplies materials for his stories all the same. Like Haroun’s father Rashid he cares less of who wins the election and who does not, he wants only his audience, all electors to be amused. This is here to explain itself : Whenever Rashid was talking about Khattam-Shud and his henchmen from the Union of the zipped Lips, the whole audience stared very hard at Snooty Buttoo and his henchmen who were sitting behind Rashid on the stage…..” (Haroun and the Sea of Stories 206). Chaudhuri discards any literary form. Autobiography too is not so much a form to him. Biography presented by him is an image of Bengal, then of India and the subject offers an uninspiring show that calls for a stand-by mentor’s care. Judgement in objective form is a sort of egotistic approach and style of presentation does not help any symbiosis. Naipaul’s is not an altruistic image of India. Indians in India and abroad, in different settings, are varied almost in everything to Naipaul. But on one point, a sluggish neighbourliness among themselves, not too close, not too remote on the basis of caste or sect becomes always visible to him-“…they developed something they would never have known in India: a sense of belonging to an Indian community” (Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now 7). Identity can be easily ascertained. For Naipaul identity is very important. The El Dorado to the European adventurers is a loss because it is misconceived. But to Naipaul it cannot be, because it is not an adventurer’s romantic fancy forming an unreality. It is a creator’s sure find, if not a mound of gold, at least a fertile field for a creator’s crop. Miguel Street is his first harvest and Hat himself is the reminder of an obscurity, though he can be a cause of worry of a remote European rule, as early as 1625 AD. Naipaul’s is actually a fictional reconstruction of India. Nowhere his judgement is permitted to becloud his sense of story. All his characters are individuals and his power of observation awakens in him an amused interest, as it may call for a similar interest in readership. Rushdie is more on the side of enjoyment. His ‘Nishapur’ in Shame was built up for protection from outside sins, but sin inside proliferated more horribly than it could without such a meticulous care to prevent contamination. Aristotelian concept of tragedy yields place to Arabian Night’s dragons and devils to engross another interest which stories serve by their accepted unrealities. Rushdie’s India, divided or undivided – presents jocular inhumanity for surpassing heroic blood game of Medieval Tournament and Spanish Bull-fight in the West. He only upholds the eastern standard.

R. K. Narayan who assured Naipaul ‘India will go on’ ( Naipaul, An Area of Darkness 232) is the one writer who evoked India which Graham Greene hailed as his ‘second home’ just in this word : There are writers – Tolstoy and Henry James to name two – whom we hold in awe, writers – Turgenev and Chekhov – for whom we feel personal affections, other writers whom we respect – Conrad for example – but who hold us at a long arm’s length with their ‘courtly foreign grace’, Narayan (whom I don’t hesitate to name in such a context) more than any of them wakes in me a spring of gratitude; for he has offered me a second home. Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian (Back cover page of Mr. Sampath). Like Hardy, Narayan is a regional novelist. Malgudi, though a fictional city, represents an area in the Southern part of India. Metaphorically Sampath is Nataraja’s cousin quizzically frauding everybody for a living. Only Srinivas a sober Indian penman, perhaps Narayan’s closest personal representation of an honest Indian and Shanti, and ideal beauty, Ravi’s ideal love making him a true artist project an India that provided space enough for a Holywood of Indian kind and all fracas in its rehearsal trail. Naipaul could not write it. His is India visited, even re-visited, a nostalgia never leaving him, yet ever remaining slipping out of his hold. Graham Greene’s simulated ‘second home’ is not his, neither his is Narayan’s ‘home’. It persists still as Naipaul’s nostalgia.

WORKS CITED

1. Chaudhuri, N. C. Thy Hand, Great Anarch! . Chatto and Windus Ltd, London, 1988. Print. 2. ……………… The Continent of Circe. 1965, Jaico Publishing House : Bombay, 1974. Print. 3. ……………… Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. 1951, Jaico Books, Mumbai, 2005. Print. 4. French, Patrick The World as It Is. PICADOR INDIA, London, 2008. Print. 5. Naipaul, V. S. The Masque of Africa : Glimpses of African Belief . Vintage International, New York, 2011. Print. 6. ……………… An Area of Darkness. PICADOR INDIA, London, 2002. Print. 7. ……………… India : A Million Mutinies Now. 1990, Vintage, London, 1998. Print. 8. ……………… Half a Life. PICADOR INDIA, London, 2001. Print. 9. ……………… The Mimic Men. 1967, PICADOR INDIA, London, 2002. Print. 10. ……………… India : A Wounded Civilization. 1979, PICADOR INDIA, London, 2002. Print.

11. ……………… Miguel Street. 1959, PICADOR INDIA, London, 2002. Print. 12. ……………… A Way in the World. 1994, Vintage, London, 2001. Print. 13. ……………… “Two Worlds”, The Nobel Lecture, 7 December 2001. 14. . Narayan, R. K. Waiting for the Mahatma. Indian Thought Publications, Mysore, 1965. Print. 15. ……………… Mr. Sampath. Indian Thought Publications, Mysore, 1956. Reprint. 2002. 16. Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh. Jonathan Cape Ltd, Great Britain, 1995. Print. 17. ……………… Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Penguin Books India, 1991. Print. 18. ……………… Midnight’s Children. Vintage Books, London, 1995. Print. 19. ……………… Grimus. Vintage UK, 1996. Print. 20. ……………… Shame. Vintage International, New York, 1989. Print.

Tuberculosis and Nineteenth Century Literature: Aestheticization of the Malady as a ‘Romantic Disease’ Arup Ratan Chakraborty

I Within the history of literature no other disease is as complex and enigmatic as tuberculosis. Tuberculosis stands unique within the realm of literature against other diseases due mainly to its commonality: the disease was one of the most prolific killers of human beings all over the globe. Tuberculosis, for a very brief time in history, became a symbol for a tragic beauty that marked the social structure and literature, art and theatre of the day. Although the disease was most virulent and potent killer that transcended all races and nations, suffering from tuberculosis was thought to bestow upon the sufferer a heightened sensitivity. The Romantics, especially, embodied this disease, which shaped many of the classic works of the period. ‘Consumption’, ‘phthisis’, ‘scrofula’, ‘Pott's disease’, and the ‘White Plague’ are all terms used to refer to tuberculosis throughout history. It is estimated that it reached its peak between the end of the 18th century and the end of the 19th century. Its high mortality rate among middle-aged adults and the surge Romanticism, which stressed feeling over reason, caused many to refer to the disease as the ‘romantic disease’. This paper argues how tuberculosis came to be known as the glamorous and artistic Romantic malady. The slow progress of the disease allowed for a peaceful death as the sufferers could arrange the remaining journey of their life. The disease began to represent spiritual purity and temporal wealth, leading many young, upper-class women to purposefully pale their skin to achieve the consumptive appearance. British poet Lord Byron wrote, “I should like to die of a consumption”– “Why?”– “Because the ladies would all say, ‘Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying” (204), helping to giorify the disease as the disease of artists. Even after medical knowledge of the disease had accumulated, the redemptive-spiritual perspective of the disease continued in literature. In literature, as well as life, tuberculosis became more than just a disease: it became an art. In his 1966 article “Tuberculosis and the Creative Writer” John Wilson argues that “all art is forged out of human experience, and pulmonary tuberculosis is one of the deepest and most testing experiences that a man [or woman] can undergo” (161). Though the disease was extremely destructive and painful there emerged in both literature and contemporary medical discourse a belief that the disease could cause one to possess special creative qualities. By the early Eighteenth Century there also existed “alongside the horrible pathology… a tradition of the art of living well with, and dying a good death from, consumption” (Lawlor and Suzuki 463). As the Eighteenth century progressed, having tuberculosis and being treated for the disease became “an experience associated with refined cultural values and aesthetic

81 pleasures” (475). The Nineteenth Century “developed and transformed, rather than denied, the culture of aestheticized consumption” that developed in the previous century (462).

Katherine Byrne's new book Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination is a welcome addition to the recent medical humanities scholarship on the interrelationship between literature and medicine in nineteenth-century Britain. It furthers recent study on the interrelationship between tuberculosis and literature in the work of, for example, Clark Lawlor's Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Palgrave, 2006). Byrne's well-researched book provides an impressive array of historical sources on tuberculosis, rescued from the annals of time, and makes interesting and important cultural connections between Victorian medical knowledge and trends in nineteenth-century fiction. In her book, Katherine Byrne describes the numerous subject types that tuberculosis became associated with in literature: [Tuberculosis] has been associated simultaneously, though not always congruously, with youth and purity, with genius, with heightened sensibility and with increased sexual appetites. The resulting images have become famous textual tropes: the languishing consumptive poet whose thwarted desires and personal frustrations seem to have brought about his illness; the Christlike [sic] innocence of the child who dies because they are too pure for the world; the beautiful but wan and pining girl whose decline owes much to her broken heart…(Byrne 3) Many of these literary tropes existed in literature long before the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. Consumption was considered closely linked to one’s emotions, particularly love and desire. As Susan Sontag explains in her essay “Illness as Metaphor”, the fever associated with tuberculosis was a sign of “inward burning,” and someone with tuberculosis was ‘consumed’ by ardour…leading to the dissolution of the body” (20). Metaphors taken from tuberculosis “to describe love” were the “the image[s] of a diseased love...long antedates the Romantic movement. Starting with the Romantics, the image was inverted, and TB was conceived as a variant of the disease of love” (Sontag 20). The literary portrayal of tuberculosis in the nineteenth century contrasts with the scientific reality of the disease with the oft-romanticized portrayal in fiction. An examination of a selection of the major works of John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë and Fyodor Dostoevsky reveals that these writers had firsthand experience with tuberculosis – they either suffered from the disease themselves or were surrounded by those who did. Tuberculosis and the aestheticization of the disease play a major role in many of their works. Instead of acute terror, in many observers and victims of the fatal disease the attitude was one of lofty melancholy. Rene Dubos, a French-born physician and author of many scientific books and essays, observed that to be consumptive was almost a mark of distinction, and the pallor caused by the disease was part of the standard of beauty.

III

As René and Jean Dubos point out in their classic 1952 study The White Plague Tuberculosis, Man and Society, “all of the tragedy of consumption, the perverted attitude of the romantic era toward the disease and the ignorance of Nineteenth Century medicine…are exemplified in the story of John Keats” (11). In fact, according to Clark Lawlor the entirety of “Masculine consumptive mythology centres [sic] around Keats as the primary symbolic figure of the consumptive poet” (9). A gifted and talented poet, he died at the age of twenty five from the same disease which had claimed his mother and three brothers. His association with the disease was present in many of his works, which swell heavily on the theme of life “as a tangle of inseparable but irreconcilable opposites” (Abrams 95). These opposites, such as love and cruelty, pervade his poetry and show an irresistible beauty found in the life cut short and the early death of a loved one. It is this view that begins to explain the positive Romantic metaphors given to ‘consumption’. Keats’s experience with his illness had a profound effect on his writings – many of his poems have reference to death or dying young. Each of Keats’s odes, including “On a Grecian Urn,” “On Melancholy,” and “Ode to a Nightingale,” are, according to John Evangelist Walsh, a “muffled cry from the very depths of the heart over what appears the cruel transience and shortness of life, and the heartbreak of its close” (36). Written in 1819, “Ode to a Nightingale” contains some of Keats’s most poignant allusions to death – the first half of the ode is comprises the poet’s desire “to escape the self and its human condition” (Sheats 91). The world of “weariness, the fever and the fret,” where “but to think is to be full of sorrow / And leaded eyed despairs” is far too overwhelming for the narrator. He tells the nightingale that he will fly to it – however, as Paul D. Sheats points out, this “imaginative union with the bird already portends the self- annihilation that becomes temptingly explicit in stanza six” (90-91). In Stanza VI the narrator conceives of death as an “eternal present” and the “prolongation of the ecstatic moment” (Sperry265): Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! (Norton 904)

Although “Ode to a Nightingale” makes no explicit reference to tuberculosis, critics believe that the line from Stanza III “where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” is a direct reference to the death of Keats’s brother, Tom (Lawlor 112). The description of youth growing “pale…spectre thin” and then dying can easily be read as a reference to the wasting symptoms of tuberculosis.

In “Ode on Melancholy, “ which is probably Keats's best known statement of his recurrent theme of the mingled contraries of life, he implies that it is the tragic human destiny that beauty, joy, and life itself owe not only their quality but their value to the fact that they are transitory and turn into their opposites. He clearly shows these opposites of beauty mingled with pain: Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips…. (Norton 907) This poem embodies this English Romantic view that permeated the very definition of ‘consumption’; in this horrible disease, there is a mutability that Keats had witnessed first-hand in his own life with the death of his mother and three brothers, and then with his own illness. However, even in a horrible, ugly death, there is a beauty to be found. Within Nineteenth Century American literature, no writer is as dark, enigmatic, or as tragic as Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s life was a rather depressing record of poverty and loss, and his life greatly influenced his writing. He often wrote of idyllic love that ultimately ends in death, as “the death and loss of the woman he loved was one of the most constant factors in Poe’ s life” (Galloway 33). One of the major influences in Poe’s life was the prolonged illness and eventual death of his wife, Virginia Clemm, from tuberculosis. Poe was, by all accounts, devoted to Virginia, and her illness influenced his moods and his ability to write. In his works, Poe portrays consumption as “the disease of an easy and beautiful death. In the Romantic formulation, consumption was aestheticised in a positive manner as a sign of passion, spirituality and genius” (Lawlor 1-2). Poe may have witnessed first-hand his wife’s slow and terrible decline, but “unique as he was in so many ways, Poe was close to cultural norms in his attitude to consumption” (3). One of the most extreme examples of Poe’s romanticization of tuberculosis lies in a single paragraph in one of his first short-stories, “Metzengerstein,” a story in which the young Baron Fredrick’s mother, Lady Mary, dies of consumption. The narrator describes the disease as ‘gentle,’ where the end is neither painful nor gross, but ‘glorious’. The narrator even breaks away from the story and wishes all those he loves would die of consumption: The beautiful Lady Mary! How could she die? – and of consumption! But it is a path I have prayed to follow. I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease. How glorious! To depart in the hey-day of the young blood – the heart all passion – the imagination all fire – amid the remembrances of happier days – in the fall of the year – and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous autumnal leaves! Thus died the Lady Mary. (Poe 97) The mention of the “gorgeous autumnal leaves” in the paragraph about Lady Mary

84 solidifies the romantic image of consumption: “autumn was traditionally the time for consumptive death but also the most visually poetic of seasons” (Lawlor 2). The image of falling leaves was, according to Dormandy, a metaphor in tuberculosis literature for “failing hopes [and] the destruction of young lives” (85). Poe, like many of his contemporaries, reveled in “the terrible beauty of consumption” despite being frequently exposed to the devastating reality of the disease (93). However, “Metzengerstein” presents not a disease that is painful or terrible, but easy and painless. The consumption in “Metzengerstein” is the romantic consumption – a disease that is close to the cultural norm at the time. “Metzengerstein” and “The Masque of The Red Death” represent the two extremes of Poe’s portrayal of tuberculosis. On the one side, he presents a disease that is ‘glorious’ and ‘gentle’ and on the other the horror of the Red Death as there is no escape from it. Like Poe, Charlotte Brontë had numerous first- hand experiences with the disease; in fact The Brontë family history with tuberculosis is one of the most tragic instances of what was, in Victorian England, called “familial phthisis”: “a terrible susceptibility to consumption (tuberculosis) seen in the members of a single family that seemed to prove that the disease or a predisposition to it was inherited” (Carpenter 55). All of the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s six children would die of consumption. Charlotte Brontë outlived each of her siblings – she died on March 31, 1855 at the age of thirty-nine. Despite her first-hand knowledge of the disease, Charlotte Brontë’s most famous novel Jane Eyre features one of the archetypal consumptive characters – that of the angelic consumptive child. Helen Burns represents the archetypal tuberculous (female) child, that of the almost divine being, who is too good, too pure, too innocent, and too good for this sinful Earth. In fact, from the mid-eighteenth until the end of the Nineteenth Century “the dying tubercular maiden would be represented commonly in all media and genres as a beautiful bride of heaven, an angel too pure and spiritualized to abide long in the material world of the crude body and less- refined minds” (Lawlor and Suzuki 479). This character’s death from TB is almost never portrayed as being painful. The line between the deaths of children and young women from tuberculosis in literature is “a hazy one in this period, but the Victorians relished the uncorrupted innocence of children taken to heaven” (Lawlor 167). The character of Helen exists as a foil to the young Jane, who has a fiery, unforgiving temper, and she is not at all spiritual; when asked how she would avoid hell, Jane replies: “I must keep in good health, and not die” ( Brontë 41). Helen is mild, passive, and very religious, telling Jane “…the Bible bids us return good for evil” (67) and that Jane must “observe what Christ says, and how he acts – make his word your rule, and his conduct your example” (70). Unlike Jane, Helen bears the cruel treatment she receives at Lowood School with patience and reserve, considering the punishments she receives to be just. Helen’s death is very calm and peaceful — the typical death ascribed to consumptive children. Helen is, as Katherine Bryne describes “a Christ like portrait of resigned, uncomplaining suffering, and it is notable that her death, from consumption has more meaning...than those of dozens of others who die around her in the typhoid epidemic” (16). Helen is among the numerous “angelic, too- good- to-live child heroes” common throughout Nineteenth Century literature (16). While Jane Eyre was published in England in 1847, nearly twenty years later in Russia, Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment described the polar opposite

85 of the pure tubercular death. The death of Katerina Ivanovna’s is anything but pure or calm, nor is her disease a means of spiriting her away from the sinful world. Her disease is seen, rather, as a result of the drudgery and degradation of poverty. Katerina Ivanovna was originally born into a family of means – she is described as being “a person of education and an officer’s daughter” (16). After her husband, the drunkard Marmeladov, loses his job the family sinks into poverty, and they must live together in one tiny squalid room. As Marmeladov relates his family’s story to Raskolnikov in a bar, he says that Katerina Ivanovna’s consumption is a result of their poor living space — “we live in a cold room and she caught cold this winter and has begun coughing and spitting blood too...her chest is weak and she has a tendency to consumption” (17). When Raskolnikov meets Katerina Ivanovna she is described as: A rather tall, slim and graceful woman, terribly emaciated, with magnificent dark brown hair and with a hectic flush in her cheeks. She was pacing up and down in her little room, pressing her hands against her chest; her lips were parched and her breathing came in nervous broken gasps. Her eyes glittered as in fever and looked about with a harsh, immovable stare. And that consumptive and excited face with the last flickering light of the candle-end playing upon it made a sickening impression. (29) Katerina Ivanovna’s disease is neither spiritual nor glamorous, and her death is the exact opposite of the easy death experienced by the Christ-like consumptive children. Her disease is not aesthetic, nor is it intended to be seen as such. The Marmeladov family’s situation is, according to Edward Wasiolek, “a paradigm of the sentimental situation” common in Dostoevsky’s novels, but in Crime and Punishment this “sentimental situation takes on a new significance; it becomes a tool of moral perception n” (Wasiolek 52). By the end of the novel, Katerina Ivanovna descends into madness. With her husband dead, and desperate for money, she sends her children out into the streets to beg. As she forces them to sing for a small crowd, making a spectacle of herself and her children, Lebeziatnikov cites consumption as a possible cause for her madness: “they say that in consumption the tubercles sometimes occur in the brain” he tells Raskolnikov (495-496). As Katerina Ivanovna chases after her children in the street she suffers a haemorrhage and is helped by Sonia and Raskolnikov into Sonia’s apartment. Once there she lapses into delirium and, eventually: “she sank back into unconsciousness again, but this time it did not last long. Her pale, yellow, wasted face dropped back, her mouth fell open, her leg moved convulsively, she gave a deep, deep sigh and died” (Dostoevsky 508).

The first nail in the coffin of the notion of romantic consumption came in 1882 when German bacteriologist Robert Koch isolated and identified the causative agent of tuberculosis: the Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Following this discovery it was proven that “tuberculosis was not hereditary as formerly believed but an infectious disease caused by the tubercle bacillus” (Bryder 3). Koch’s work “produced such a phenomenal sensation among the lay public and in medical circles that it was immediately regarded as...heralding a newer a in the study and control of disease”

(Dubos and Dubos 102). Tuberculosis was, after Koch’s discovery, “no longer a vague phantom. The heretofore unseen killer was now visible as a living object and its assailants at last had a target for their blows” (102). The tuberculosis bacillus was merely a germ which could be contracted by anyone (Lawlor 186-187). Koch’s methods and findings flew in the face of traditional medicine, and his findings remained “to most practising [sic] doctors outside Mediterranean countries...a difficult concept to swallow” (Dormandy 135). Koch’s findings were met with some resistance – some refused to believe Koch entirely, and set out to prove him wrong. However, these “unbelievers were fighting a losing battle” (Dormandy 136). With the ushering in of the industrial revolution in Europe, tuberculosis reached epidemic proportions. The slums of teeming cities became cauldrons for the incubation of tuberculosis, and the disease spread like wildfire through the upper classes, rural communities and the tenements of the cities. The romantic illusion of the disease was destroyed and new metaphors replaced the old ones; metaphors of certain death, automatic transmission, and the disease as a predator and thief of life. The change from one extreme to the other is a fascination study in a societies need for meaning and blame in tragedy, and is a precursor to the many modern diseases that morph from metaphor to metaphor. A new view started to form: As the number of deaths mounted throughout the first half of the century, it became obvious that the gravity of the disease could no longer be concealed under a genteel but misleading expression. But as the Nineteenth Century progressed into the Twentieth, the literary cult of aestheticized tuberculosis began to suffer a slow decline. By the advent of streptomycin and other antibiotics, the romantic myth of ‘consumption’ had vanished. Instances of the disease in the First World declined dramatically throughout the twentieth century. Tuberculosis no longer sets a person apart, it does not make someone seem as though he or she possess special creative qualities. Tuberculosis became, and still remains, a force to be conquered, not celebrated.

Works Cited

Abrams, M H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc, 1958. Print. Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005. Print. Bryder, Linda. Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth- Century Britain. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988. Print. Byrne, Katherine. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print. Byron, Lord George Gordon. The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron Vol 1 (1798- 1811).Teddington, UK: Echo Library, 2007. Print. Carpenter, Mary. Health, Medicine, and Society in Victorian England. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. Print. Dormandy, Thomas. The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis. London, England: The Hambledon Press, 1999. Print. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Enriched Classic ed. New York, NY:

Simon & Schuster, 2004. Print. Dubos, René, and Jean Dubos. The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society. 1952. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992. Print. Galloway, David, ed. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays and Reviews. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1986. Print. Greenblatt, Stephen, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print. Lawlor, Clark. Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print. Lawlor, Clark, and Akihito Suzuki. "The Disease of Self: Representing Consumption 1700-1830." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.1 (2003): 458-94. Project Muse. Web. 7 Oct. 2012. Poe, Edgar A. Edgar Allan Poe Complete and Unabridged. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 2006. Print. Sheats, Paul D. "Keats and the Ode." The Cambridge Companion to Keats. Ed. Susan J. Sontag, Susan Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York, NY: Picador, 2001. Print. Sperry, Stuart M. Keats the Poet. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973. Print. Walsh, John E. Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats. 1st ed. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Print. Wasiolek, Edward. "Crime and Punishment." Fyordor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment: A Casebook. Ed. Richard Peace. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2006. 51-74. Print. Wilson, John R. "Tuberculosis and the Creative Writer." JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 196.1 (1966): 41-4. Print.

Sanctifying Slaughter: Predatory Culture in Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess” Asit Panda

Sir E. B. Tylor (1832-1917), the renowned British anthropologist in the opening lines of his book, Primitive Cultures (1871) offered us one of the oldest definitions of culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. Victorian morality, an essential component of Victorian culture, can be described as any set of values that espouse sexual restraint, low tolerance of crime and a strict social code of conduct. During the Victorian and Edwardian periods British society was underpinned by rigid moral and social values; with ideal forms of masculine and feminine behaviour. Moral respectability and domesticity were important ideologies of feminine behaviour. The ‘woman’s mission’ was that of supportive wife, dutiful daughter, and caring mother, and the woman’s domestic role was viewed as an important and pivotal part of society. In Victorian society repression of sexual desire was regarded as a sign of good breeding and was encouraged by popular ideas such as the “cult of true womanhood”, the “code of chivalry” and the Social Purity movement. However, like many other fields, in the field of sexuality the Victorians had their well-known compromise. Although the Victorians permitted indulgence in sex, they restricted its sphere to conjugal felicity and happy married life. They disfigured physical passion and illegal gratification of sex impulse. The possibility of any relation between man and woman other than the conjugal was something alien to Victorian morality. In Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot we are introduced to ‘two young lovers’ walking in the moonlight, but we are at once reassured by the information that these two lovers were ‘lately wed’. The Victorian ideal was to achieve ‘wedded bliss’ rather than satisfaction of the sexual urge by illegal and unauthorized methods. Women, who were fettered by specific societal and familial mores and roles in nineteenth century England, were held to a higher, almost impossible, standard of abstinence, and were judged more harshly for moral transgressions than their male counterparts. Popular notions regarding the role of the woman in society concentrated on the “submissive wife”. Women had to be seen as incarnation of purity, almost like angels but not as normal humans. The Victorian ethic made, as Haughton commented, “fidelity the supreme virtue and sexual irregularity the blackest of sins” (356). But in the sphere of sexuality, Victorian society was marked by a manifest double-standard. While it was unimaginable that a woman would have any sexual thoughts, it was understood that a man did. Women were supposed to repress their sexuality. Women seen as falling short of society's expectations were believed to be deserving of severe penalty which sometimes culminated in social ostracism. Women were expected to have amorous relationship with only one man, their husband. If women did have sexual contact with another man, they were seen as ruined or fallen.

A young lady’s worth was measured in terms of her chastity and complete innocence. Once led astray, she was the ‘fallen woman’, and nothing could reconcile that till she passed away. Victorian literature and art are replete with examples of women paying dearly for straying from moral expectations. Adulteresses met tragic ends in novels such as Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, while in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy depicts a heroine castigated by her community for losing her virginity before marriage. While some writers and artists showed sympathy towards women's subjugation to this double-standard, some works were didactic and reinforced the cultural norm. Now against the backdrop of this widely discussed Victorian morality and the accompanying double-standard, I intend to attempt in my present paper a critical interrogation of Robert Browning’s two popular poems and his portrayal of women characters. As Mary Elizabeth Burt observes, “In his portraiture of women Robert Browning has shown himself a consummate artist”. Through his characters in both the poems “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess”, Robert Browning incorporates, vivid and violent imagery that reveal his sexual and social views of women. These writings suggest Browning’s transgressive outlook on the societal roles of women. Apart from dealing with two mentally disturbed male characters, “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess,” demonstrate striking similarities in portraying these male characters’ relationships with women who, despite apparently being loved by their male partners, are eventually mercilessly slaughtered. And interestingly enough, both men seem to be much happier after they have committed these murders, a fact which highly astonishes modern rational readers who conclude by considering such gruesome murders as actions of abnormal psychology. But when viewed from the perspective of Victorian morality and the harsh punishment the society kept reserved for its female transgressors of moral codes, the murders of the heroines of these two poems do not surprise us so much, rather seem inevitable. "Porphyria's Lover" was first published as "Porphyria" in the January 1836 issue of Monthly Repository. The poem did not receive its definitive title until 1863. The opening lines are evocative of a fierce and malicious natural force, which is illuminated later on in the poem. The ‘elm-tops’, which have been torn down, signals death and anticipates Porphyria’s terrible future. The storm outside has some sort of correspondence with mental agitation within that provokes the lover. Yet, while depicting this violently animated nature, the lover sounds perfectly sane and his speech proceeds clearly and logically. Entering the cottage Porphyria ‘‘kneeled and made the cheerless grate/Blaze up, and all the cottage warm” (Browning 8-9). At this point it must be said that the reader cannot be sure of what kind of woman Porphyria is. The speaker carefully avoids disclosing her true identity. What his speech betrays—“vainer ties dissever”—makes her identity and position in the society all the more equivocal. We cannot be sure whether she was a married woman or not. One thing is, however, clear that she belonged to the higher stratum of society than the speaker. Variant readings have attempted to adjudicate the poem’s class and gender politics, seeing Porphyria as “promiscuous” (Shaw 75), “too proud to marry him” (Burrows, 63), the lover as “a working class man who strangles his mistress in order to keep her true and faithful” (Hawkin 63), the murder as a displacement of erotic passion (Lamgbaum 83), or an indictment of the bourgeois values that infect and

90 alienate desire. Since the speaker may be insane, it is impossible to know the true nature of his relationship to Porphyria. Theories, some of them rather bizarre, abound: some contemporary scholars suggest, for example, that the persona may be a woman; if so, the strangulation could stem from frustration with the world. An incestuous relationship has also been suggested; Porphyria might be the speaker's mother or sister. Another possibility is that she is a former lover, now betrothed, or even married, to some other man. Alternatively, she may simply be some kind lady who has come to look in on him, or even a figment of his imagination. However, about the basic narrative of the poem most readers would agree: that it deals with a clandestine meeting, real or imagined, transgressive in terms of contemporary sexual mores and codes of conduct, the outcome of which is the slaughter of the woman. In terms of the domestic ideology, Porphyria’s flight, unchaperoned, from the socially-defended space and activity of the “gay feast” might seem to promise the breaking of further taboos. The bringing of physical comfort and intimacy, suggestive of mutual physical contentment, is experienced by the male, however, as sexually seductive: the reiterated “and” records his escalating rapt attention to the woman’s progressive undressing, her attempt to rouse him first by calling his name, and then by offering “her smooth white shoulder bare”. The murder, when it comes, at once accuses Porphyria of her sexual “fall”, and saves her from it. The enactment of the murder has a ritualized quality that underlines the speaker’s sense of himself as moral agent: “… all her hair / In one long yellow string I wound / Three times her little throat around / And strangled her”( Browning 38- 41). Motivated by the prevalent notion of morality, the speaker finds Porphyria culpable but not himself. Much can be made of the final line: "And yet, God has not said a word!" Possibly, the speaker seeks divine sanction of the murder. He may believe God has said nothing because He is satisfied with his actions. God may be satisfied because: He recognizes that the persona's crime is the only way to keep Porphyria pure; or, because He doesn't think her life and death are important compared to the persona's. The persona seems waiting for some sign of God's approval. William Devane tells us that the event described in Browning's "My Last Duchess" has a basis in Italian history and that the Duke is a poetic recreation of Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, the story of whose first and second marriage is similar to the story of Browning’s Duke (cited in Kanda 28). But in the handling of the theme, manifest influence of Victorian age is perceived. In the words of K. C. Kanda, “Possibly, Browning saw in the Italian situation a relevance to his own age , the age of Queen Victoria which was experiencing a similar crisis resulting from the clash of religious and secular forces, of evangelical zeal and materialistic ambitions, furthered by the growth of industrialization” (28). As presented in the poem, the Duchess's sin is that she violates the code of conduct for a noble wife. Yet, can the modern reader really feel the woman did anything wrong? The only sin in this poem is that the woman fails to suppress her emotions. The real problem is that she defied the idea that women are not supposed to be as sexually open as men. Women were to serve as the "Angel in the House" but the Duchess defied that image. That type of thinking is characteristic of Victorian standards of women. This is especially true of the upper classes to which the Duchess belongs.

Browning portrays the young Duchess as a victim of social codes. The Duke feels as if the Duchess “should derive pleasure essentially only from himself” (McCoy 3). She was looked at from other males as a sexually attractive woman. Even in a portrait that the Duke is showing a guest after her untimely death she has an erotic look in her eye but it isn’t necessarily toward the Duke. He says that “Paint/ Must never hope to reproduce the faint/ Half-flush that dies along her throat” (Browning 17-19). He never wants to be with another woman who is like her. The Duke wanted a woman who would only obey and pay the utmost and strict attention to only him. The Duchess is unjustly accused of being adulteress when, in fact, she is just a typical young woman. The Duke misinterprets her childish curiosity as a sign of disrespect. Browning sets the poem up to show how women are considered as property and how ridiculous such treatment is. Even in death, the Duchess is still a possession. The Duke commissioned a painting of her in order to symbolize that he will always possess her. Yet, the painting also allows the Duchess to aggravate him in death. Domhall Mitchell claims that "[i]n the Duke's eyes, the woman had defects that he could not ignore, even in artistic representation" (74). When showing the painting off, he comments on the color painted in her face, "Sir, `twas not/ Her husband's presence only, called that spot/ Of joy into the Duchess' cheek" (Browning 13-15). The Duke cannot come to terms with the fact that his Duchess is so immodest in his view. The Duke insinuates that the Duchess had an affair in order to make him seem like a victim to the Count's agent. Only the reader realizes she was the victim of a man who felt his masculinity was being threatened. The Duke claims, “She had/ A heart-how shall I say? -too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er/ She looked on, and her looks went everywhere" (Browning 21-24). The generosity of heart and the innate simplicity, which the Duke mistakes for signs of adultery, prove eventually disastrous for the Duchess as she has to pay with her life: “Oh sir, She smiled, no doubt, / Whene'er I passes her; but who passed without / Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together” (Browning 43-46). Mitchell notices the Duke's view of women: "his wife is quite literally converted into an object of art, and it is noticeable that he refers to his next bride as "my object" (75). The Duke's pride of owning the Duchess, even in death, embodies the mentality of the early Victorians that women were seen as possessions. Thus the poem deals with society's high expectations of women's control over their own nature. The duchess fails to observe the standards set before her and consequently gets slain. Hence, as it appears from a specific reading of Robert Browning’s two poems, extramarital love or the amorous relationship between man and woman transgressing social taboos is sure to face disaster. And it is not the man but the woman who has to pay dearly for such violations. Rightly it has been pointed out by W. T. Young that “The tragedies of love are for Browning’s women rather than for his men” (xxxii). But interestingly, as critics like Young have observed in conformity with the general Victorian attitude toward love and sexuality, Browning’s poems celebrate triumphs of love in poems of wifehood and motherhood. However, the two poems examined in this paper, apart from exposing Victorian double-standard regarding sexuality, seem to reveal how the specific culture of an epoch marginalized female sexuality as insignificant, condemnable and punishable. And Browning’s

92 women characters, despite their apparent innocence and at times inherent nobility, seem to have fallen preys to the specific codes and mores of a patriarchal society in which they inhabited.

Works Cited Bayley, S. Victorian Values: An Introduction. Montreal: Dawson College, 2008. Print. Browning, Robert. Robert Browning: Selected Poems Ed. Daniel Karlin. London: Penguin Books, 1989.Print. Burrows, Leonard. Browning the Poet. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1969.Print Burt, Mary Elizabeth. Browning’s Women. Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Company, 1887. Print. Hawkin, Stephen. Robert Browning. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870. London: Oxford UP, 1957. Print. Kanda, K. C.. Selected Dramatic Monologues of Robert Browning (1812 – 1889). New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited., 1996. Print. Langbaum, Robert, The Poetry of Experience: the Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.Print Mitchell, Domhall . "Browning's "My Last Duchess”. Explicator 50.2 (1992): 74-75 Print Shaw, W.David. The Dialectical Temper: The Rhetorical Art of Robert Browning. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968.Print. Young, W. T.. “Introduction” Browning Poems: 1835-1864.London: Cambridge University Press, 1911, First Ind. Ed.1984. Print.

East-West synthesis: Rabindranath Tagore, the Janus-headed Nationalist

Samit Kr. Maiti

According to the primitive Roman mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, with his two faces turned in opposite directions that symbolize the forward and backward visions of the god. He is frequently represented as a god allegorizing progress from past to future, from one state of existence to another, from one vision to another as he can see into the past with one face and into the future with the other. Since his two heads are dovetailed in a unique way, this combination suggests the mysterious reconciliation of the opposites, hence a meeting ground between the two extremities, between barbarism and civilization. The status of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) as a uniquely ambivalent nationalistic thinker can fairly be equated with the double-headed Roman god because of his singular ideal of his life-long dream of synthesis of the East and West. He jeered at the motto ‘East is east and West is west and never the twain shall meet’. He rather believed whole- heartedly that a commonwealth of nations is possible in which each nation will participate in a world festival by their mutuality of cultural and intellectual properties. In an essay, named ‘Bangalir asha o nairashya’ (The hope and despair of Bengalis), written much before his first visit to England, Tagore writes longingly:

The European idea in which freedom predominates, and the Indian idea in which welfare predominates; the profound thought of the eastern countries and the active thought of the western countries; European acquisitiveness and Indian conservatism; the imagination of the eastern countries and the practical intelligence of the West – what a full character will be formed from a synthesis between these two.1

Tagore was an earnest advocate of inter-civilizational alliance; his imagination was given to a symbiosis of the Oriental and the Occidental which are so commonly deemed to be diametrically opposites, hence he is Janus-like. But what is most surprising is that Tagore was not only a poet, philosopher and thinker; he was an active worker, who had endeavoured, throughout his career, through various political and professional activities, to actualize his ideal. He was not a passive dreamer living in the utopian world of fantasy. He was fundamentally a poet, but his earnestness in spreading the message of East-West synthesis through art and actual life proves his artistic and social obligations.

It is well-known fact that though Tagore’s life-long ideal had been to strike a synthesis of the East and West, he was critical of both, especially of the West on various issues, but predominantly, on the issue of the Eurocentric notion of militant nationalism. “A nation”, according to Tagore, “in the sense of the political and economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose…It is the side of power, not of human ideals.”2

His criticism of the West becomes fierce when he goes on to trace out the effects of this mechanical nation on the spiritual life of the people of the East. He thinks that the western nation can never lead to the betterment of the human civilization because it is born and brought up with the ideals of greed, competition, exploitation, non- cooperation and expansion of geographical territory. Surprisingly, these ideals are also the fundamental principles of colonialism and imperialism which Tagore hated so much. So, it is Tagore’s conviction that the western nation and nationalism can de never good to the East but can produce only the effects of dehumanization and moral bankruptcy at the cost of the living human ideals:

This process (nationalism), aided by the wonderful progress in science, is assuming gigantic proportion and power, causing the upset of man’s moral balance, obscuring his human side under the shadow of soulless organization. We have felt its iron grip at the root of our life, and for the sake of humanity we must stand up and give warning to all, that this nationalism is a cruel epidemic of evil that is sweeping over the human world of the present age, and eating into its moral vitality.3

This anti-nationalistic sentiment has been most brutally manifested in a poem entitled, ‘The Sunset of the Century’, composed on the last day of the nineteenth century. The blank verse, so deftly handled, brings out the volcano of passion of derision against the all-devouring ideal of nationalism of the poet-humanist:

The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red Clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its Drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash Of steel and the howling verses of vengeance.

The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in a Violence of fury from its own shameless feeding. For it has made the world its food. And licking it, crunching it and swallowing it in big morsels, It swells and swells Till in the midst of its unholy feast descends the Sudden shaft of heaven piercing its heart of grossness.4

Through out his long literary career Tagore had waged a crusade against this ‘fetish of nationalism’ because he believed that the culture of nationalism is harmful for both the subject race and the master race as it generates “the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspicion and greed and panic.”5

But Tagore who had been so violent as a rebel to western nationalism, cultural decolonization, colonialism and imperialism, is not blind to evaluate the role of the West in shaping the Indian community into a disciplined, justice-loving nation:

The protection of law is not only a boon, but it is a valuable lesson to us. It is teaching us the discipline which is necessary for the stability of civilization and for continuity of progress…The reign of law in our present Government in India has established order in this vast land inhabited by peoples different in their races and customs. It has made it possible for these peoples to come in closer touch with one another and cultivate a communion of aspiration.6

Tagore’s relationship with the West, like many other things, had been ambivalent. He is not always a blind antagonist to the West. In many occasions, he acknowledges his debt to the West. As in the essay,‘Nationalism’ he acknowledges the superiority of the British culture, literature and humanistic ideals:

I have a deep love and a great respect for the British race as human beings. It has produced great-hearted men, thinkers of great thoughts, doers of great deeds. It has given rise to great literature. I know that these people love justice and freedom, and hate lies. They are clean in their minds, frank in their manners, true in their friendships; in their behaviour they are honest and reliable. The personal experience which I have had of their literary men has roused my admiration not merely for their power of thought or expression but for their chivalrous humanity.7

Thus Tagore conveys his solid faith that the West is a land not only of modern technology and scientific advancement but also of benevolent humanity. But at the same time, he acknowledges impartially that these are insufficient to make a nation complete and self-sufficient. The West must come in contact with the East which is the land of spirituality to celebrate a carnival of perfect cultural unification. Hence, Tagore’s final verdict is, “…West is necessary to the East. We are complementary to each other because of our different outlooks upon life which have given us different aspects of truth…And when in India we become able to assimilate in our life what is permanent in Western civilization we shall be in the position to bring about a reconciliation of these two great worlds.”8

The harmful effect of chauvinistic nationalism on the average Bengali is narrated powerfully in his two novels, The Home and the World and Four Chapters. The novels can also be read as examples of Tagore’s self-criticism. Tagore intends to give warnings to his countrymen against the blind worshipping of the western splendour of materialism and nationalism by losing the cultural and racial distinctiveness. He is also critical of China and Japan, the two great Asian nations, for their propensity to follow the path of the West by sacrificing their ancient, pre- historic tradition of spirituality and cultural heterogeneity. Needless to say, despite Tagore’s criticism of the East, he had a profound love and respect for the Oriental traditions, especially the great Indian religious and cultural traditions established by the sages like Chaitanya, Nanak, Kabir, Ramakrishna and the two great Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata from the time immemorial. Thus Tagore maintains a balance between the Orient and the Occident in making either criticism or wholesale appreciation.

Tagore believed in an interactive world based on deep sense of elemental humanistic sympathy, generosity, mutuality, the main objective of which would be to create a morally and politically enlightened community of nations. The concept of nation based on the ideals of mutual hatred, xenophobia, narrow-mindedness, mean selfishness, self-aggrandizement, and sense of greed is an anathema to Tagore. It is true, like all other humanists, Tagore also aspired for freedom; but mere ‘political freedom’ was not his ambition, his aspiration was for a spiritual freedom, intellectual freedom and moral freedom which is not curbed meanly by external compulsions or forces. The poem, ‘Where the Mind is without Fear’ finely illustrates his view:

Where the mind is without fear, the head held high; Where knowledge is free; where through the night and day The homestead walls have not, within their yard, Shut up in small space a fragmented earth; Where utterance wells up from the heart’s spring; Where the stream of work with pace unfaltering From land to land through every quarter goes With a myriad fulfillments along its course; Where desert sands of petty rule have not Choked justice’s stream, diffusing manly worth In hundred paths… With ruthless blows from your own hand, awaken India, O Father, into that heaven.9

In fact, this ideal of freedom has much in common with Tagore’s own concept of ‘Dharma’ which he valued as something superior to mere political freedom. This ‘Dharma’ has nothing to do with religious norms; it is the essence of life, independent of any outside agency. This is where Tagore’s idea of ‘Dharma’ meets with Gandhi’s.

Tagore, like Shelley, was an idealist, a dreamer, but unlike Shelley, he was not an ‘ineffectual angel’; his dream was based on the solid grounds of reality. His ‘Visva-Bharati’, a university set up at the heart of rural Bengal, Bolpur, Shantiniketan, was an earnest endeavour to materialize his dream of connecting East with the West. He wanted to make it a world centre for the study of humanity. He had the ambition to make his university a place somewhere beyond the limits of nation and geography. As the name suggests, the university was designed to nourish the distinctive cultures of both ‘Visva’, the world and ‘Bharati’, the Indian. Both the cultures would be nourished and nurtured simultaneously, without hampering their distinctiveness. Tagore intended the university to be a rendezvous of the East and the West. It would be a splendid example of cultural confluence, as it would be both local and global, hence post modernistic ‘glocal’. But the execution of such a dream was nothing but a Herculean task. As Dutta and Robinson comment, “From 1918 until his dying day Tagore would bear his university on his shoulders almost like the

97 cross on the way to Calvary.”10 He had to travel from one country to another, from one hemisphere to another to collect funds for his dearest International University but, most importantly, as an apostle of universal brotherhood among nations to spread the message to stop the deadly dance of death and destruction, war and carnage.

Tagore was not only a great poet and a philosopher; he was also one of the great educationists who experimented with the system of education and tried to make a permutation of the western and Indian traditional systems of education. His ‘The Parrot’s Tale’ is a satirical exposition of the heartless, soulless, inhuman and mechanical western system of formal education that was forcefully applied to the Indian subcontinent during the colonial period. Instead, his ideal of education was based on the philosophy of reciprocal co-operation and a mutual interdependence of various cultures, a system that would bring out the best of the two worlds, the East and the West, the rural and the urban, the ancient and the contemporary. His ‘Visva Bharati’ was designed with that purpose of enshrining his innovative ideal of education.

Shriniketan, a rural village of Bengal, situated near Shantinikatan, offers a concrete example of Tagore’s endeavour at bringing about a peaceful reconciliation of the apparently divergent cultures and practices. In this village Tagore started a farm, the nucleus of his ‘institute for rural reconstruction’ with the untiring effort of Leonard Elmhirst, a young British agricultural economist which inspired many in the government of Independent India. The village was mostly populated by the ‘santhals’ or ‘adivasis’, the marginal community, living under the threat of extinction due to the onslaught of modernity. But Tagore, though he was not a professional anthropologist and an economist, he was instinctively aware of the need of preserving the marginal culture. He tried to solve the dire economic needs of the tribal people, educated them in health, scientific agriculture, and encouraged them to love their own tradition and culture without being swayed by the devastating wave of modernity.

At the heart of Tagore’s ideal of the synthesis of the East and West lies his fundamental faith in the philosophical and religious belief in the spiritual unity of man. This faith had been deep-rooted in his mind from his early youth, as Dutta and Robinson admit:

The idea of India as a land with a genius for the synthesis of East and West, which had been present in his writing as far back as 1878, grew to dominate his thinking. He had never been interested in the dynastic history of India and its violent political struggles: always in writing about Indian history he stressed what he saw as its spiritual unity, incarnated in the Buddha. In Tagore’s eyes, Buddha combined both contemplative spirituality and active spirituality-East and West so to speak.11

Even in ‘Nationalism’ Tagore writes:

India has been trying to accomplish her task through social regulation of differences, on the one hand, and the spiritual recognition of unity on the other…Towards this realization have worked, from the early time of the Upanishads upto the present moment, a series of great spiritual teachers, whose one object has been to set at naught all differences of man by the overflow of our consciousness of God.12

So, this principle of the inter-civilisational union is the product of Tagore’s staunch faith in religion. His whole corpus of writings consisting of poems, novels, dramas, songs, letters and essays is resonant with the ideals of cosmic peace, universal brotherhood, inter-national alliance, moral upliftment, and an espousal of this centrifugal outlook.

References:

1. Dutta, Krishna, and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad- minded Man, New York: Tauris Park Paperbacks, 2009, p. 77. 2. Tagore, Rabindranath, Nationalism, Macmillan Pocket Tagore Edition, 1976, reprinted 2009, p. 13. 3. Ibid., pp. 20-21. 4. Ibid., pp. 131-132. 5. Ibid., p. 30. 6. Ibid., p. 23. 7. Ibid., p. 21. 8. Ibid., p. 19. 9. Tagore, Rabindranath, Selected Poems, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 170. 10. Dutta, Krishna, and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad- minded Man, p. 219. 11. Ibid., p. 151. 12. Tagore, Rabindranath, Nationalism, pp. 9-10.

Gala of Friendship and Male-heroism: An Approach to Tennyson’s Ulysses

Subrata Sahoo

Tennyson himself says that Ulysses, written shortly after Hallam’s death (September 1832), states his “feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam (1850)”. Hence, it can't be ignored that the time the poem was written was in close propinquity to the death of Tennyson's best friend, Arthur Hallam. Noted by a number of scholars and biographers as the greatest tragedy of Tennyson's life, the death of Hallam would have had a philosophical effect on the poetry and maturity of Tennyson for years to come. Now, what I intend to show is how Tennyson uses the vehicle of friendship to escape the vacuity in his life created by the hasty demise of his Cambridge friend. At the same time, I propose to show how he goes on to celebrate male –heroism through the heroic spirit of the Homeric hero.

Tennyson himself admits that there is a colossal autobiographical context for “Ulysses”. He was struggling with the loss of Arthur Henry Hallam, and observably this kind of personal loss makes his poem a gala mourning for his dear and near friend. It is likely that Ulysses represents Tennyson's desire to replace the absence of the love he had for Hallam with the adventure and excitement which British expansion embodied. For Tennyson, not only grief and loss, but the realization that he had been suppressing an urge to be like the heroes of mythology and explore the unexplored.

Ulysses, published in 1842, was written a decade earlier on the twentieth of October, 1833. News of Hallam's death was received by Tennyson on the first of October, 1833 (Ricks 321). It is clear that Tennyson did not get over the shock arising out of the death of Hallam in three weeks. Tennyson went on a veritable hiatus from publishing works for a number of years. Tennyson was in search of an escape route for his pent –up feelings. A feeling of wretchedness overpowered him. He wanted to ‘answer’ his critics, especially John Wilson Croker. Ulysses provided him with that answer. That he wanted to bid farewell to the inertia that paralysed his aspiring spirit is amply clear in the opening stanza where Ulysses expresses his dislike of those Ithacans "that hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me". Tennyson feels lonely and a necessity for solitude. In this escape, he returned to his childhood dreams of being the kind of mythical hero he'd read about in works by Homer and Dante. Imbued with the fascination for exploration working in the unconscious of his national culture, it's no wonder that he posited replacing his friend with fantasies of adventure and excitement. Years after publishing the poem, Tennyson himself admits that "There is more about myself in Ulysses, which was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than

100 many poems in In Memoriam." (Ricks 321) This sentiment is amplified while reading the lines "I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move." Ulysses obviously served as a form of therapy for Tennyson, as he chose to focus not on the grief he felt at Hallam's death but at the seemingly limitless opportunities which exploration offered.

This isn't to say that Ulysses could entirely escape the vacuity that Tennyson felt with the absence of his compatriot. Speaking of his father, Tennyson's son who is named for Hallam, wrote "My father ... takes up the story of further wanderings at the end of the Odyssey. Ulysses has lived in Ithaca for a long while before the craving for fresh travel seizes him. The comrades he addresses are of the same heroic mould of his old comrades." (Ricks 322) The mariners described in Ulysses have "toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me" and these are the feelings Tennyson epitomized with Hallam. Tennyson, like Ulysses has lived his life in a similar routine for years. But for Tennyson, the loss of his friend seizes upon him a feeling that he has missed out on the adventure and struggle a man could put up with in the nineteenth century. When Tennyson writes "Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world" he is as much inspiring the reader as trying to reassure himself that there is still time to experience the greatest things life has to offer. He does not have the option, as Ulysses does, to leave his family and life to their own devices. Just as Ulysses' role is as a king, Tennyson's role is as a poet, and he will not abandon his post. Arthur Waugh who wrote a biography of Tennyson gives an account of how he acted following the death of Hallam, based on writings from Francis Garden writing to Trench. He is depicted as "plunged into the deepest affliction" and that "even poetry failed to charm him from his sorrow." (55) Waugh then illustrates the following years of Tennyson's life as revolving around silent development of his expertise and steady work, as he wrote to Trench himself that he had "so far recovered from the catastrophe in which his sister was involved as to have written some new poems, and, they say, fine ones". The final real publication that showed any mellowness in the poetry of Tennyson at the time was a volume called Transactions, which included verses by Tennyson's brother "regarding the expedition of Napoleon Buonaparte to Russia, and two poems by Hallam and Tennyson upon 'Timbuctoo'." (59) This publication shows that voyage and exploration were topics very close to Tennyson right before the death of Hallam, but after his demise were bottled up in him in lieu of new uneasy friendships and grief.

The unfathomable amount of constant worry and downhearted feelings that no-doubt descended on Tennyson with the death of Hallam could have manifested itself in any number of ways. The fact that Tennyson dealt with his pain by engrossing himself in an earth of far-fetched flights and valiant execution mirrors a great deal about how Tennyson envisioned the obsession of the Victorian people with exploration during the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, it was a genetic inspiration for comfort to him. He considered England as another Ithaca from which he could leave on an exploration when things got too heavy. This is why the protagonist of Ulysses has such an listless view of his home-life, referring to his wife only in passing as "aged" and rendering his son's values as different than his own

101 when he says "He works his work, I mine". Because Tennyson himself found no comfort in his local surroundings following the loss of Hallam, he sought something peripheral; much like Ulysses does in the poem. Just as Ulysses becomes uninterested with his life without adventure, Tennyson is uninterested in life without Hallam. The solution for both of them, at least in Tennyson's mind, is adventure. While Tennyson might not have given into his urge to adventure (the poem also offers various examples of the dangers of such endeavors) he at least asserts that exploration is good because in doing so, Ulysses is following his inner-most desires

In an essay entitled "The Dilemma of Tennyson" by W.W. Robson, the author states that "There is plenty of evidence that Tennyson felt himself compelled, as Laureate and mouthpiece of Society, to write things in which his peculiar genius was not involved" (159) As the poem was published a decade after the death of Hallam, in the midst of a cultural obsession with exploration, it's likely that Tennyson made this work available to appease the masses. While he wrote the poem in order to deal with the death of his best friend, he was still under pressure to produce work that would appeal to his audience, and this is likely why he didn't reveal the true impetus for the poem until years after its publication. By penning Ulysses about the draw of exploration so soon after the death of his friend, Tennyson was as much a developing a coping mechanism as well as an outlet to discuss his inner desire to experience life. It is interesting to note that while Tennyson didn't become a great adventurer, (he had to settle for poet laureate) the possibility of exploration and the glory of victory was what comforted him in his time of sorrow.

Male-heroism

Ulysses finds the meaninglessness of life which he has been enjoying in his hilly kingdom in the company of old wife and ruling over the savage people who do not know him. He begins with an invocation to the abstinent standard of manhood and reinscribes sexual difference in points of domestic dogma: “It little profits that an idle king,/ By this still hearth…/Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole/ Unequal laws”. Rather, he wants to “drink life to the less” as a typical Victorian would have done. A life of indolence is no more than death. It is a life in death. A life of rest from all toils and moils is not desired. He has seen much and known much but is not satisfied with what he gained; for him as to the Victorians –

All experience is an arch where through Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move

Like Edward Dramin, Lynn B. O'Brien calls into question the notion that Tennyson's "Ulysses" is a celebration of Victorian ideals of heroism. While Dramin draws on Tennyson's military models and on a psychological analysis of the hero, O'Brien discusses Tennyson's ambivalence with regard to the gender identity which underlies his hero's rejection of domesticity in favor of restless questing for personal glory.

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When we read Ulysses between the lines , we find that the poem reveals inconsistency and disagreements within Tennyson's thought concerning the nature of heroism, the meaning of achievement, and the end results to the being and the social order arising from a life devoted to heroic action. The poet's curious juxtaposition of "Ulysses" and its companion piece, "Tithonus," expresses Tennyson's polarized thinking on gender relations, as Ulysses and Tithonus are entrapped in antithetical predicaments. While Tennyson seems to have believed in the need for men to model their behavior on the heroic mold, lest they become imprisoned and attenuated by the feminine, he seems to have been cognizant of the incompleteness and falsity of that heroic stereotype and also sensitive to how the culturally projected masculine image was often detrimental to both men and women. I believe that, at some level of his artistic consciousness, Tennyson knew that the image of the dominating male propounded by his culture was an illusion, that it did not reflect the truth of the male experience. Yet, despite his awareness of the illusory nature of this stereotype, despite his recognition of the psychological sense of alienation which resulted from adherence to these cultural precepts, Tennyson was nevertheless mesmerized by the illusion, positing it as a standard to which all men must strive or else risk losing their male essence.

The idea of exploring uncharted territory attracted the interest of the public in the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century. In Header's (1966) historical analysis of Europe during this era, he describes England in terms of its navy. He depicts it as "So much larger, and her army so much smaller, than those of any other power" (192) and contends that Britain was mainly interested in exerting greater influence on coastal communities, developing a presence in the unknown parts of the world (including the north and south poles as well as the source of the Nile) and maintaining control of the most efficient mode of transportation at the time: By sea. It is no wonder that the poet laureate of the United Kingdom was therefore influenced by the cultural phenomenon that was this interest in exploration. The laureate in question, Alfred Tennyson, penned a poem which relates to this cultural fascination as well as his own inner-desire to be a part of the world it represents with Ulysses.

The adventurous spirit in Ulysses does not allow him “to pause, to make and end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” The unquenchable desire seized him:

To follow knowledge like a sinking star Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Ulysses’ energy is inexhaustible. Man’s life is short. To Ulysses a little life is left. But old age does not mean, for him the end of life so to Ulysses ceaseless activity and motion and not, “to strive, to seek to find and not to yield” are ought to be ever remembered as even in old age. Some work of noble note may yet be done. Till one’s death every hour should be spent in actively. It may prove a bringer of new things. This guiding principle for life is typically Tennysonian and basically Victorian in tone.

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The high spirit, energy and resolution of Victorian Age are fully celebrated in Ulysses. Ulysses like a typical Victorian is fired with energy to grasp the unattainable and the infinite. With his old mariners he is extremely eager to go out a new voyage in search of undiscovered shore and fresh adventure;

To sail beyond the sunset and the baths Of all the Western stars until I die It is true that though the mariners are not in full strength of young’s, though they are “made week by time and fate” but they have the will and the determination to touch the untouchable.

Thus, Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is a superb creation of artistic excellence. It is a typical Victorian poem in which the poet uses friendship as one of the possible means to compensate the loss and vacuity created out of the premature death of his friend; at the same time, the poem is a celebration of typical Victorian male- heroism through the relentless and tireless wander-thirst of his protagonist, Ulysses. To quote Harold Bloom (2000),

“Tennyson’s hero reworks a legend taken from both ancient and medieval sources, creating a story of social relevance to the Victorian era, as well as with personal meaning for Tennyson’s own life”.

Noticeably, Tennyson’s Ulysses, a mellow fruit in his green garden of friendship with Hallam whose premature demise ruefully led him to spare his ink writing the poem, may rightly be said to have become the splendor mirror for the projection of the Homeric hero who is saliently virile in his exploits than the gentle courtly lovers of medieval imagination. Moreover, Ulysses, the hero of classical Greek myth, has especially become an alluring shape to act in a securely male-dominated world where women are downgraded to the slide-lines as mothers. Ulysses truly epitomizes the model of arduous manliness when he vows: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”. From all these perspectives, it may be asseverated that Tennyson’s Ulysses has indubitably become a model for masculinity and a figure of male heroism to let slip how vital the classical Greek tradition is to Victorian ethnicity and society.

Bibliography

Robert W.Hill JR. Tennyson’s Poetry. New York and London: W.W.Norton &Company,2002. Bloom,Harold. Alfred Lord Tennyson: Chelsea House Publishers.2000. Hearder, H. Europe in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1966. Robson, W. W. "The Dilemma of Tennyson." Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson. Ed. John Killham. New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1960. Tennyson, Alfred. Selected Poems. Ed. Christopher Ricks. New York: Penguin, 2007. Waugh, Arthur. Alfred Lord Tennyson. New York: Macmillan & Co., 1896 Lucas,F.L. Ten Victorian Poets. Kolkata: Books Way, 2010

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Bristow, Joseph.Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Nation as Woman / Mother: A Critique of Bankimchandra’s Anandamath

Bisweshwar Chakraborty

In the 19th century Indian nationalist agendas we could discern a strong note of woman/mother-centric resistance against the Empire. Images of motherland and mother goddesses are continuously evoked in the construction of nationalist ideology. The trope of nation-mother served an important purpose of holding claim to the land of one’s own birth that has been forcibly controlled by an alien force. As the expanding metaphor of the mother spreads beyond its personal significance to a greater national significance, the nation gets unified by a sense of belonging to a territory. A significant instance is Bankimchandra’s early nationalist text Anandamath in which the relationship between nation and mother becomes conspicuous when a santan (Bhavananda) asserts:

We recognise no other mother. ‘One’s mother and birthland are greater than heaven itself.’ But we say that our birthland is our mother. We’ve no mothers, fathers, brothers, friends, no wives, no children, houses or homes. All we have is she who is rich in waters, rich in fruit, cooled by the southern airs, verdant with harvest fair. ” (Anandamath or The Sacred Brotherhood by Julius Lipner: 145)1

Here, this linking of mother and nation rejects living woman and the bonds of family life that they represent for a completely symbolic woman-as-nation. This complex and contradictory representation of women as mothers may be associated with the ideological structuring of womanhood both in the public sphere of the nation and the private sphere of domesticity. Bankimchandra’s novel demonstrates how the hegemonic project of nationalism turns women into active agents in the nationalist project as abstraction and at the same time thrust them into the iron house of absolute chastity, stern widowhood and a supposedly established aptitude for self- immolation. According to Aurobindo, from Anandamath, for the first time revealed the birthland “as something more than a stretch of earth or a mass of individuals, - as a great Divine and Maternal power in a form of beauty that can dominate the mind and seize the heart.” 2 No doubt, the novel became the Bible amongst the Indian nationalists during the anti-colonial struggle in the later half of the 19th Century.

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Partha Chatterjee’s discussion on ‘The Nation and its Women’ reveals that the ‘material/spiritual’ discrimination was compressed into a more encapsulating ‘dichotomy’: the difference between the ‘outer and the inner.’ This outer/inner duality ‘separates the social space into ghar and bahir, the home and the world.’ The ‘world’ is the ‘external’; the material domain that involves the public space. On the contrary, the ‘home’ is one’s inner private self. If the world is ‘typically domain of the male’, ‘the home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world – and woman is its representation’ (P. Chatterjee, 1992:120) The nationalist ideology holds women as prakriti and the spiritual principle that is believed to have the unique virtues of motherhood, patience and endurance. Such a patriarchal hierarchy solidified by the age-long traditions of the Dharmashastras, Smritis and Puranas barely permits any substitute forms of politicization among women. Neither does it respect the adjustment nor does it recognize the negotiation women contrived under the oppressive regime within their limited spheres of participation. Like marginal entity the women have been overpowered and made to confine to a ghetto by the macropolitical discourse of nationalism which hinges on the imagery of motherland so that women could enter the public space to carry out maternal roles. Under this rubric of nationalism, political and national enunciation, thus, get domesticized since traditional gender roles are not always stultifying; instead, they provide scope for effective politicization.

19th Century Indian women actively participated in social and political activities, but they did show no desire for public appreciation. Even though their parts were not large and they had their limitations, they command the field of contemporary politics to be extensive enough. The dual nature of women’s representation, whether constricted within a series of injunctions and limitations made obligatory by nationalist ideology or discerned in the form of militant feminism, does not allow the enunciation of the multifarious strategies women have administered in either organizing campaigns or supporting their counterparts to uphold campaigns against the empire within that limited space. The nationalist thinkers used the image of the Nation-as-Mother not only to create their own anti-colonial lineage but also to limit and control the activity of women within the imagined community. Under the colonial subjugation, the image of nation or culture as a mother contributed to suggest both female power and female powerlessness. The nation as mother sheltered her son at the time of colonial ravages, but was also herself ruined by colonialist exploitation and in want of her son’s fortification. ‘I know’, writes the Indian nationalist Sri Aurobindo, ‘my country as Mother. I offer her my devotions, my worship. If a monster sits upon her breast and prepares to suck her blood, what does her child do? Does he quietly sit down to his meal ... or rush to her rescue?’3

In colonial situation during the 19th century this mother image served as a powerful trope to appropriate the nation-in-the-making. Bankimchandra’s Anadamath extols this cult of mother worship that identifies India with Mother Goddess or Shakti .To quote Aurabindo again, “What is a nation? What is mother country? It is not a piece

106 of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. It is a mighty Shakti , composed of all the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation.”4 The identification of mother and one’s own country comes to the fore when Mahendra heard the song “I rever the mother!” but could not make out (145).He thought who was this mother “Rich in waters, rich in fruit,/ Cooled by the southern airs,/Verdant with harvest fair.” To his curiosity Bhabananda answers “ ... our birthland is our mother.” He introduces himself as one of “Mother’s Chidren.” (145) The earth Mother here provides succour to her children. The symbolic relationship between mother and the nation is thus asserted by identifying her as Nurturer, Container, and Property. Appreciably Anandamath is abbey of ascetic monks like Bhabananda, Jibananda and others referred to in the novel as Santans or sons, suggesting implicitly that the earth mother exists only for sons and not for daughters.5 Again this unpronounced powerlessness of the mother image is unequivocal as all these characteristics can be claimed by men. In fact, mothers are ‘romanticised as life-giving, self sacrificing, and forgiving, and demonized as smothering, overly involved, and destructive. They are seen as all powerful - holding the fate of their children and ultimately the future of society in their hands - and as powerless - subordinated to the dictates of nature, instinct and social forces beyond their ken.’6

Most vital for the emerging nationalist consciousness was the concurrent structuring and transcendence of the goddess of the motherland as the sublime ‘treasure in individual and collective life.’7 (Sarkar 2009:216) Anandamath was not the first one to embody the nation as Mother. In a play called Bharatmata(1873) the Motherland is seen lamenting as she is reduced to a spectre-thin figure owing to utter exploitation and forceful robbery of all her dearest possessions imperialist agents who continue to assault and abuse her while her children doze on8. Bankim transforms this abject figure into a more sombre and glorious goddess. However, there are several indications which show this goddess is an underling of a greater power whose gender can not be appropriately ascertained. In the temple she is held on Vishnu’s lap. In Kalyani’s dream she appears as a figure “weeping in anguish”(154) standing in front of “someone” who “appeared to be sitting high up in the sight of all, as if a blue glowing mountain” that “was burning gently within. A great fiery crown was on his head and he seemed to have four arms.”(153) On hearing the complain of the Motherland that it is for her Mahendra could not come to her this higher One commands her: “Leave your husband now and come to Me. This is your Mother; your husband must serve her.” S/he also summoned her: “I am husband, mother, father, son, daughter – Come to me.” (154) This gives the impression that the Motherland is given a somewhat lower position within the divine hierarchy. At the same time, the song Vandematatrm9 affirms that the Motherland is the utmost objective of absolute devotion and dedication.

The song starts with Sanskrit, then moves to Bengali, and concludes with Sanskrit passages harking back to its opening. It begins with an impassioned apostrophe to bounteous and beauteous land that nourishes its children. Bounty and material

107 affluence shape into the image of a motherland owning an embryonic potency that stems from the image of Durga, the demon-slaying goddess; from the statistical census; and from the sublime importance that Bankim attributes to the motherland within the Hindu pantheon: “Yours the form we shape in every shine!” The land, for the moment, becomes synonymous with the icon of Durga. The image of Durga then eventually transfigures into goddess Kali, another incarnation of the divine mother, but now furious and wild. The song ends with a reverberation of the sense of bounty and nourishment with which it began and the goddess invoking her children to augment her power with their own. In between, there is just a clue of her present pathetic condition: “Powerless? How so Mother,” – but what comes out of this hymn is the sense of continuously emanating power that surge back and forth from the mother to her sons. In an uninterrupted cadence, the song impresses upon three discrete images of the fostering mother: the mother of the past, the mother of present in complete abjection, and the victorious mother of the future. ‘Later nationalists saw the demon-slayer as pitted against the colonial power and used the song as an abbreviated history of colonial exploitation and the patriotic struggle for liberation.’10

‘The central preoccupation of the Bengal puranas’, observes Kunal Chakrabarti, ‘is with the goddess cult.’11 He shows the existence of female divinity among the tribal sects which, were absorbed into brahmanical tradition over the ages, and finally, found the entirety of form in the Devi Mahatmya and the Markandeya Purana around the 6th Century AD. The reinstated goddess, neither completely non-Vedic nor wholly brahmanic, was a creation of intermingling of traditions. In Anandamath this course of cultic construction that took thousands of years is achieved in an instant. Divinities of long-established mythical tradition are extracted from their distinctive backgrounds and rearranged in an imaginary context to forge anew a higher divine form. The new deity is featured with three forms, each corresponding partially to three goddesses of the Hindu divinity: Jagaddhatri, the nurturer; Kali, the destructive Shakti; and Durga, the demon slaughterer. In sharp contrast to popular Hindu belief, this unique goddess – the goddess of the Motherland – has no mythological base, no life-account of her own. In Bankim’s hands she is the unified divine abstraction of both the actual human mother and the earth mother.

The narrative progresses through correlated chain of events concerning the Santans whose nationalist asceticism consolidates ‘the investment in martial masculinity.’ (Chakraborty 2011:61)The Bengali term ‘santan’, though not gender- specific, is in Anandamath used spcially to signify the ‘male’’ children of the motherland, the committed sons who have resolved to liberate their country from the foreign rule. It seems the national rebirth is entirely dependent upon their emergence. Thus when Mahendra, mesmerised by the iconographic images of the nation, asks: “When will we be able to see the Mother in this form [of Durga]?” Satyananda retorts, “When all Mother’s children recognise her as Mother ... ”(151). This association of the nation’s future to her (male) children’s performance combines the material and idealist aspects of the narrative using the somatic, so

108 that it works as a device of masculine supremacy.12 The passive mother-nation now needs powerful sons having sharp martial skills to obtain freedom from the alien clutches.

Hence, distinct from oft-discussed traditional womanhood and motherhood, Bankimchandra’s discourse on ascetic nationalism provides a new space that effectively strangles women’s voices and desires as ‘real’ men (implying the santans) are insisted to discard their families to join the brotherhood movement. The male protagonists in Anandamath presuppose their wives’ recognition of their resolution to relinquish family life as a given, or forcefully threat them into consenting to the “arrangement” (165). The women appear as objects men must thrust aside or, at most, as ‘partners who are expected to secure the sexual discipline of their vulnerable men.’ (Chakraborty 2011:68) For instance, Mahendra’s wife Kalyani is an impediment to her husband’s resolution to celibacy. She needs to poison herself and their daughter Sukumari, so as to, assist Mahendra to be baptised as a santan. Seemingly, releasing her husband from familial bondage, she encourages him: “Fulfill the vow you’ve taken with all your mind and heart.” (156) This deliberate act of self-sacrifice, however, does not free Kalyani from being Mahendra’s wife. She is ultimately brought round by Bhabananda, who happens to be so obsessed with her that he is prepared to give up his santanhood if she returns his love (197). But Kalyani, tells him that she is waiting for her husband to complete his task and come back to her, and also makes him aware of his higher duty to the motherland. On the other hand, the santan Jibananda clarifies to his wife Shanti that he has not forsaken her; he has taken a promise to serve the nation (166). In other words, he has willingly and momentarily renounced carnal desire for his wife for the surrogate desire for the motherland. Shanti admits and willingly acclimatizes to her situation by ignoring the sexual magnetism – by refusing to look desirable. But, very interestingly, despite such compromised distancing, when Jibanada sees her in the monastery he is all set to abjure his engagement as a santan to reunite with her. But Shanti reproves him: “Shame! You are a hero! The great joy of my world is that I am a hero’s wife. How can you abandon a hero’s duty for the sake of a lowly woman? (N)ever abandon your duty as a hero.”(166)

But Shanti embodies difference. It is her difference that allows her to take part in the masculine, public domain. Her exceptionality is accentuated by her unique educational proficiency and martial expertise. Shanti’s “unfeminine” behaviour and refutation of normative gender performance is ascribed to nurture. Brought up exclusively by her father and then dwelling with itinerant ascetics, she has hardly any chance to be socialized into traditional modes of feminity. Instead, her command on Sanskrit which she learnt from her father contributed to her tremendous mental agility. Again, she received training in “various forms of physical exercises” and “the use of different kinds of weapons” (172) to facilitate physical sternness and skill in martial arts. She is thus the ‘active face of feminine’ (Kaviraj 1995: 152). In no time she realizes that she must pass as a male to enter the masculine domain of the santans. As ascetic nationalist de masculinity depends

109 exclusively on a particular dress-code and martial dexterity, Shanti assumes the santans’ outfit (175) and suppress cultural and physical determiners of womanliness: breasts, long tresses, and female attire. But Satyananda recognises her despite her short hair, false beard and sannyasi attire. He asserts that no disguise could suppress her “voice” and the “look” (183) of her eyes. He regards her attempt to enter the monastery in disguise “sinful” (184) since her presence could divert the santans from their vows. She could be initiated as a santan only when she could willingly transform herself from wife (an object of temptation) from a ‘safe, comforting mother, erased of sexuality’ (P. Chatterjee 1992: 66).

Anandamath also makes several efforts to suppress Shanti’s masculine feats to secure her status as woman. When Satyananda tries to dissuade her access into the monastery, arguing that “the wife is her husband’s life-partner only when he follows the house-holder’s way of life. A woman has no place in the code of a hero. ” (184), she does not refute her primary liability as wife. Her virtuosity, robust determination and martial expertise enable her participation in the nationalist project possible. She is here to strengthen her husband’s virtue. She will carry out her responsibility as a wife by becoming his “partner” and “helper” in his resolution of liberating the Motherland (193). While the male santans follow the path of anushilandharma in devotion to the mother- nation, Shanti’s loyalty to her husband makes her suited to practise the same discipline. Yet Bankim essentializes gender binaries to secure Shanti’s position as woman when he makes her use stereotype feminine attributes, such as, beauty, deception, and cunning to defeat the British (as in her confrontation with Sir Thomas, 192-3) instead of a physical fight even if she succeeds the bow-test like the male santans (183). Her involvement in the public realm carefully is policed by the patriarchal structure. Satyanada allows13 Shanti to dwell in the monastery. The process of her ‘becoming a body in the social space’ 14 makes clear that her assumption of the heroic role follows not her own intention rather it is a result of masculine preference. Shanti simply follows her husband in his15 chosen course.

‘Nationalist ideology in late 19th Century Bengal thus legitimized the subjugation of women.’ writes Partha Chatterjee, ‘under a new patriarchy ... All one can assert here is that woman also took an active part in the nationalist struggle, but one can not identify any autonomous subjectivity of women’. (P. Chatterjee 1992: 66) In the nationalist mission, women-power must not be allowed to go unbridled or to develop extremist trends in spite of the apparent influence of the discourse itself. In the narrative, the imposing and violent goddess Kali, who even tramples upon her husband Shiva, is transformed into Durga, the last one among the trinity of goddesses in the monastery, who stands for domesticated power.// While Kali might represent unleashed power, her conversion into Durga is controlled by men, or as in Bankim’s novel, by the ascetic santans. She is not allowed to remain an all- powerful woman who tramples upon purusha.16 Under the emerging forms of patriarchy a woman is mythicised as a symbol of order17 : she must make her domestic space sovereign. The use of the woman in conceptualizing a nation thus

110 becomes absorbing and startling; fertile and disturbing since Bankim too, places his female protagonists on the margins of the public sphere in the 19th century nationalist discourse.

NOTES

1 This and all the citations are taken from the English version of Anandamath, skillfilly translated by Julius J. Lipener as The Sacred Botherhood. Lipener here supplies an extensive introduction contextualizing the novel and its political and cultural history, with providing Bengali or Sanskrit terms for certain words, and explanatory notes wherever necessary.

2 From Bankim Chandra: A Historical Review (1985), page no. 130 by Rakhal Chandra Nath. Here he attempts to evaluate Bankim’s contribution to the cultural resurgence in 19th Century Bengal.

3 From “Feminism, Nationalism and Postcolonialism” (page no.182) in Colonialism/ Postcolonialism by Ania Loomba. He cites it from Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy (1983:92).The statement is originally made by Sri Aurobindo.

4 From Renaissance and Reaction in Nineteenth Century Bengal:Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (page no.106) by M.K.Haldar. In this book Dr. Haldar not only translates Bankim’s Samya but gives the background of 19th Century Bengal, the matrix in which the essay was produced, and of its aftermath, so far as Bankim was concerned.

5 Rumina Sethi points out this significant view in her essay New Perceptions of Nationalist Politics: Reconstructing Motherhood included in the volume Focus India: Postcolonial Narratives of the Nation.

6 Rumina Sethi cites from Glenn, et al. (Mothering Ideology, London, Routledge,1994) in her essay New Perceptions of Nationalist Politics: Reconstructing Motherhood included in the volume Focus India: Postcolonial Narratives of the Nation.

7 Tanika Sarkar discusses in her essay “The Birth of a Goddess: Bankimcandra Chattopadhyaya’s Anandamath” how the novel came something an annunciation, not only from a meaningful literary event but even of the idea of a Hindu nation and a new Hindu goddess. It also provides an account of Hindu-Muslim relationships from which both goddess and nation drew their energies.

8 Kiran Chandra Banerjee, Bharatmata, Calcutta, 1873.

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9 The hymn was first composed by Bankim around 1876 when he was a government official. He wrote it in a spontaneous session with words taken from Bengali and Sanskrit. Later it was included in Anandamath in 1882.

10 Tanika Sarkar makes this point in her essay “Imagining Hindu Rashtra : The Hindu and Muslim in Bankimchandra’s Writings” where she critically evaluate Bankim’s Anandamath and its nationalists definition of Hindu nationhood, especially considering the hymn Vandemataram.

11 Tanika Sarkar cites this line from Kunal Chakrabarti’s Religious Process: The Puranas and the Making of a Regional Tradition, Delhi, 2001 where the author shows how the goddess cult of the tribes men got assimilated with the mainstream Brahmanic tradition.

12 Chandrima Chakraborty in her book Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism reveals through an examination of nationalist discourse how ideas about masculinity and Hindu asceticism came to be reworked for cultural and political purposes.

13 Emphasis added to point out how ascetic masculinity reinforces women’s subjugation.

14 Chandrima Chakraborty quotes from Leslie Adelson’s Making Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

15 Emphasis added to point out how ascetic masculinity reinforces women’s subjugation.

16 Rumina Sethi in her book Myths of the Nation cites Zutsi who callsGoddess Kali the ‘independent, uncontrolled woman, seductive, destructive, the woman-on-top, infact.’ Significantly, Kali bites her tongue in shame for having Shiva under her feet, and thereby represents the ‘classic sign of social control internalized.’

17 Jasodhara Bagchi in her essay “Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal” shows how the patriarchal authority in the later half of the 19th Century Bengal controlled the scope of the ideology of motherhood in spite of giving it enormous importance during the heyday of liberation movement.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Bagal,Jogesh Chandra, Bankim Rachanabali ( Vol. I), Sahitya Sansad, Calcutta, 1969. 2. Bagchi, Jasodhara, “Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal” ,EPW OCT. 20-27, 1990. 3. Bandopadhyay, Chittaranjan, Anandamath: Utsa Sandhane, Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 2008.

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4. Bhattacharyya, Amitrasudhan, Bankimchandrajibani (3rd Print), Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 2010. 5. Chakraborty, Chandrima, Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2011. 6. Chatterjee, Partha, The Omnibus Volume, OUP, New Delhi, 1999. 7. Haldar, M.K, Renaissance and Reaction in Nineteenth Century Bengal : Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay ,Minerva Associates Pvt. Ltd., Calcutta, 1977. 8. Kaviraj, Sudipta, The Unhappy Consciousness, OUP, New Delhi, 1998. 9. Kumar,T Vijay, et al., (Edited by), Focus India: Postcolonial Narratives of the Nation, Pencraft International, New Delhi, 2007. 10. Lipener, Julius J. (Translated by), Anandamath, or The Sacred Brotherhood, OUP, New Delhi, 2006. 11. Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1st Indian Reprint), Routledge, NewYork, 2007. 12. Nath, Rakhal Chandra, Bankim Chandra: A Historical Review, Pioneer Publishers, Calcutta, 1985. 13. Sarkar, Tania, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (1st Paperback Edition), Permanent Black, Delhi, 2003. 14. Sarkar, Tania, Rebels, Wives, Saints, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2009. 15. Sethi, Rumina, Myths of the Nation (1st Indian Edition), OUP, New Delhi, 1999.

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Body Image in King Lear

Paromita Deb

From the end of the Middle Ages, physique was considered as an essential clue to a person’s intellect and morality. 1 Physical appearance, hence, became an important, and often subversive, non-verbal signifier – it communicated diverse meanings transcending words. 2 Visual details of the character’s body became increasingly implicit, subtle and submerged in Elizabethan dramas. Body images of the characters in Elizabethan dramas like, King Lear (1605), constitute shifting paradigms of power. In other words, in King Lear, the paper proposes, Shakespeare helps us understand the centrality of the human body to life, especially in understanding the self and the world.

In this play, the complex relationship between appearance and power is brilliantly illustrated through the interplay of various body images. 3 In Act I Lear takes off his crown, in Act III he is bare-headed or, ‘houseless head’, and in Act IV he has a mock crown – ‘Crown’d with … weeds’. This is simultaneously a parody of both kingship and the concept of body politic. The story line and the effectiveness of the tragedy depends in part on the juxtaposition of two contrasting processes connected strongly with the body – the gradual stripping of kingship and dignity from Lear to the endowing him of a superior knowledge of naked humanity.

Again, a renewed understanding of body image leads Lear to self-discovery. The change in the body image of the King signals a change in his character as well as his disposition. Lear wears expensive and luxurious clothing at the beginning of the play. 4 His first ceremonious entrance includes Attendants and trumpets signaling his rich and powerful social identity. As we gradually go through the Storm scenes in the play, we find the former King stripping off his royal robes. Whereas his body image in the opening scene suggests pomp and pride, in the third Act it represents suffering. In the Storm scenes, Lear begins to consider humans as no more than animals, except for the fact that the former wear clothes. This is a significant epiphany on the part of the King especially because he had prided himself on his image. As Lear raves on the heath, he begins to strip off his royal outwear.

‘Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide… Unaccomodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off you lendings! Come unbutton here.’(III.iv.92-97). Finally in Act IV, scene vi, the Reconciliation scene, where the father and the daughter meet we find the former with ‘fresh garments’. With attires transformed, both Lear and

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Cordelia meet as changed people. Infact, he comprehends the real worth of the ‘bare’ body for the first time – a body that is not draped with layers of clothing or illusions. 5 This realization leads him to express some genuine feeling for the suffering of others, for the first time:

‘Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,

How shall our houseless heads and unfed sides, You looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From season such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this! (III.iv.28-33).

Thus, an improved perception of the body image – both of himself as well as of his subjects – helps Lear to understand life in more mature terms than that at the beginning of the play.

Importantly, even Lear’s death is aptly signaled through a brilliant body image – as he appeals --‘Pray you, undo this button …’ (V.iii.283). He perhaps wants the button of his own throat to be loosened. Very subtly, therefore, Shakespeare hints that after the long self – revealing action of the play, here, finally, the old King directs attention not to himself, but to the Other, to Cordelia, now precious to him than his own life. As Kent suggests that Lear got freedom from the ‘rack’, or his body, this paper argues that the old King also got liberated from the limitations of his social and political body image, or, more precisely, the ‘additions’ in this ‘tough world’. Hence, though at first, with reference to Lear body image represents power, in the third act of the play it becomes an idiom of his suffering, and finally towards the play’s end it symbolizes a worldly delimiting prison from which he desperately wanted respite.

The ambiguity of the body images and the multiplicity of the body languages of the different characters, therefore, can be seen as a powerful and subversive dramatic strategy of restructuring of mentalities and societies along radically different lines. 6 Through painfully rediscovering his own body image, and thereby comprehending the harsh materiality of the real world, Lear understands the essence of nothingness. The anxieties that this play reveal about body image point to the tenacious interconnectedness of body, discourse, performance, gender, power and politics. It is through a renewed understanding of the politics of body images that we can interpret our society in changed terms. In King Lear, Shakespeare, thus, this paper argues, articulated his worldviews through subtle and ambivalent presentation of body images of dramatic characters, making them sources of multiple narratives.

All references from King Lear are taken from The New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. Jay L. Halio, South Asia: CUP, 1997.

1 For a discussion on the ways in which the human image has been represented in the arts and literature of English Renaissance society, read Lucy Gent and Nigel

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Llewellyn, Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660, Reaktion Books, 1997.

2 For more on Renaissance clothing and drama, see, Amanda Bailey,‘“Monstrous Manner”: Style and the Early Modern Theater’, Criticism, 43, 3, Summer 2001, p. 249 – 52.

3 Harriet Dye, in her article, ‘The Appearance – Reality Theme in King Lear’, College English, 25, 7, April 1964, p. 514-17, explains that, in this drama, the clothing imagery and motif are the illusions that differentiate appearance and reality.

4 Thelma Nelson Greenfield, in her study on ‘The Clothing Motif in King Lear’, Shakespeare Quarterly 5, 3, (Summer 1954), p. 281-6, points out that, here, Shakespeare enriched the ‘clothes pattern’ which comes through familiar traditional associations and through his own consciousness of the relation of those associations to our human scheme of values.

5 In his renowned book, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear, Baton Rouge, Lousiana State University, 1948, reprinted 1963, p. 28, Robert Heilman while insisting on the importance of the ‘clothes pattern’ on the meaning and structure of the play, explains that: “The question of man’s seeing … is complemented by the question of the obstacles to sight, of the resistance offered to his vision … hence the clothes pattern, with its ramifications…”.

6 For a detailed analysis of the body and body image in early modern age, see Paromita Deb, ‘A Study of ‘the Body’ as an omnipotent concept across social, cultural and generic barriers’, Dialogue, VI, 1, June 2010, 40-46.

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The Lady or the Lord? Gender Politics in ‘The Lady of Shallot’

Soumen Chatterjee

Gender and sex are often thought to have synonymous meanings, but they are different from each other. Sex is one’s biological identity, while gender is an artificial construction rooted in sociology. Actually, gender refers to “those characteristics of socio-cultural origin which are conventionally associated with different sexes”1. Moreover, this artificial construction of gender is dominated by men, and women have been given a secondary place in the hierarchy of this construction on account of their physical weakness. Men have always restricted women in society by specifying their space and limiting their area of action. Indeed, a woman is not given any autonomous identity in society by men who consider women as commodity. Actually, a woman is not born as a woman, but society, dominated by men, turns her into a ‘woman’ restricting her into a liminal world. Simon De Beauvoir has described this fact in The Second Sex (1949) in the following words:

One is not born,but becomes a woman2

Against this gender oppression women have raised their their voices, particularly from the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Mary Wollstonecraft was probably the first writer to question the ways of male-dominated society in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) where she showed that in society women are not imparted education properly by men and this lack of education is responsible for their subordination in society and for their impaired growth. She also presented her view that in society men are only interested in the beauty of women, not in the growth of their individuality. She also argued that as women are not imparted education in proper way, they are not also successful as wives and mothers. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women she writes:

The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state;…One of the cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more affectionate to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers3.

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After Wollstonecraft many women writers and activists have questioned the attitudes of the society and among them the name of Olive Schreiner is noteworthy. Her Women and Labour (1911) showed that even in the social work-division, women have always been exploited by men and men have always shown that the labour of women contributes nothing for the development of society. Thus woman’s role in social progress has always been undermined by patriarchy. Next comes the name of Virginia Woolf who in her seminal essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929) has shown that in order to be a novelist a woman needs two things most: financial stability and a ‘Room’. Thus she questions for economic freedom and individual space for women, but these two requirements are denied to them by patriarchy. But the real triumph of feminism comes with Simon De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) where she explored that feminity is not natural to women, but it is the patriarchal society that imprisons and devalues women. She has also presented the fact that in the patriarchal society, women are never defined as individuals but as ‘OTHERS’ standing in negative relation with men. She even regarded marriage as a trap: for Simon De Beauvoir a woman’s liberty is at first restricted by her parents and after marriage her husband, in the disguise of her protector, deprives her of her liberty. She writes:

There is a unanimous agreement that getting a husband- or in some cases a protector- is for her the most important of undertakings… she will free herself from the parental home…she will open up her future not by active conquest but by delivering herself up , passive and docile, into the hands of a new master…4.

Actually, Simon De Beauvoir regards marriage as a mode of exploitation of women by patriarchy and the husbands consider their wives not as individuals, but as slaves. Thus feminists have voiced their protest against the oppression of women by men.

Since my purpose is to concentrate on a poem by Tennyson, a representative poet of the Victorian era, I would like to discuss briefly as to whether women felt themselves more ‘secured’ during the reign of a powerful queen (italic mine) or not. Ironically, in the Victorian age the patriarchal norms and customs were worshipped in society and women lived in restrictions. Women had no right to property and suffrage at that time; a woman’s duties were to love her husband, manage the domestic affairs and care her children. The woman who performed those duties well was considered ‘ideal’ in Victorian society. But men freely worked in the outside world without facing any restrictions and they dominated women. Literature of this age also presents the division between men and women; the poems of Coventry Patmore and Alfred Tennyson reflect that in society men worked in the outside world of action, while women worked in the inner world of domesticity. Tennyson has presented this division between men and women and of the dominance of men over women in his celebrated poem The Princess:A Medley:

Man for the field and women for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey: 5 (Ll.5363-5366)

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The patriarchal Victorian society adored the ‘chastity’ of women, and women who lost it were considered ‘fallen’. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles presents the story of Tess who, being seduced by Alec, lost her virginity, but was pure from within. But patriarchy judged her loss of chastity as a crime and did not pay any heed to her mental sanity. Moreover, in the Victorian society a woman could make sexual relationship only with one man- her husband, but men could have multiple partners.Thus in the Victorian society the ‘laws’ were ‘unequal’ (‘Ulysses’).

The purpose of this paper is to make a close reading of The Lady of Shallot in the light of what has been written above. It was first published in December 1832 and then after several alterations it was published in its present form in the year 1842. This poem presents the ‘marginalized’ state of women at a time when a ‘woman’ was at the centre. Fro the title it is apparent that the Lady does not have any proper name; she bears only a title and is identified with the place of her living. The very title of the poem is a pointer to the fact that in the patriarchal Victorian society women were deprived of their individual identity.

The Lady lived in the liminal world of Shallot and had no access to the world of Camelot. Shallot here represents the domesticity of life while Camelot stands for the public life of action; the domestic interior belonged to women while the public exterior was possessed ‘a priori’ by men. Thus the poem replicates – as Tim Bariinger observes – ‘the Victorian ideology of separate spheres…women’s work is inside the home, while the active work in the outside world remains a male preserve6. In that world of Shallot the Lady led a restricted life weaving always a magic web:

There she weaves by night and day A magic web with colours gay (2,37-38)7

This weaving on her part is suggestive of the duties imposed on women by patriarchy and these duties restricted women from pursuing higher aims in life. She was not permitted to take part in the activities of the external world.

Again the ‘web’ which she was weaving was not the direct representation of reality; rather she collected her materials from the reflections of the images on the mirror. Thus her aesthetic vision is twice removed from reality and as a result her art work lacks the depth of life. Moreover, here we find that she gathered her materials from the reflections of the images on the mirror and this mirror is symbolic of the media that distorts truth and presents truth in a new dimension to the people. Again as she could not participate in the active life directly, she became quite fed up and in her state of dissatisfaction she cried out:

I am half sick of shadows 8 (271)

Through this agonized utterance, she is actually presenting the miseries faced by women in the domestic sphere of the Victorian society.

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But when she saw the image of active Lancelot in the mirror, the image aroused in her the desire to participate in the world of action. Then forgetting her curse, she looked directly to Camelot and for that reason she had to die. So her wish to join in the active world of men failed forever. In this context Harold Bloom observes –

Thus, she is forever denied the experience of an active and passionate involvement with the world9.

Her attempt to cross the boundaries of the domestic world for entering into the world of action brought the curse on her and caused her death. Thus the curse symbolizes the punishment that patriarchy imposes on women when they try to cross their limits. Through the ‘fate’ of the Lady the poet is indicating the tragic fate of those subjugated women who try to go out of their narrow domestic life but in vain. Thus the poem vividly presents the condition of those women who, as Christine Poulson observes,

….step out of their appointed sphere, and the judgment and punishment two which they are then exposed 10.

Actually, like the Duchess in Browning’s My Last Duchess, she is also a victim to the chauvinism of men. Moreover, when the Lady was dying, she was ‘robbed in snowy white’, the typical bridal dress of the women. This wearing of the bridal dress by the Lady at the time of her death is a severe attack on the system of marriage which, ironically, stand for the death of the self of women.

The Lady is the object of the male gaze; she is never a woman with desires, rather she is always desired. She is not seen by anyone:

But who hath seen her wave her hand? Or at the casement seen her stand? Or is she known in all the land, The Lady of Shallot? 11 (1,24-27)

But the bower inhabited by her is the object of male gaze and her fairy-like qualities and her excellent mode of singing made her the talk of the town. Furthermore, when her dead body was washed ashore and the news of the death of this lovely Lady reached the royal banqueters, they became totally gloomy:

And in the lighted palace near Died the sound of royal cheer 12 (4,155-156)

To these royal people the Lady was an object of sensual attraction and for this reason her death caused their pseudo-dejection. At last the knight Lancelot came there and praised the ‘beauty’ of the (dead!) Lady and begged God to bless her ‘grace’:

He said, ’She had a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace,

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The Lady of Shallot 13(4,160-162) These words of Lancelot are significant as they show that in the patriarchal society a woman is judged by the yardstick of her physical beauty. Moreover, he appealed to God to bless her ‘grace’ and here by ‘grace’ Lancelot implies those qualities in women which attract men. ‘Has God created women for the enjoyment of men?’ is the question that haunts the mind of the readers. Is the Lady ‘another Nora’, the heroine of A Doll’s House?

Works Cited:

1. Goring,Paul ,Hawthorn, ,Jeremy and Mitchell ,Domhnall, Studying Literature: The Essential Companion, London,Hodder Education,2001, reprint 2008, p.248

2. De Beauvoir, Simon, The Second Sex,New York: Vintage Books, 1973,p.301

3. Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Women ,Matsell.A.J., ed.NewYork,Havard College Library,1833,p.6

4. De Beauvoir, Simon, The Second Sex,London:Four Square Books,1961,p.352 5. Cumberlege, Geoffrey,ed. Poems of Tennyson:1830-1870,London: Oxford University Press,1912, reprint 1946,p.328 6. Barringer,Tim, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, New Haven: Yale University Press,1999,p.142 7. Cumberlege, Geoffrey,ed. Poems of Tennyson:1830- 1870,London:Oxford University Press,1912, reprint 1946,p.53 8. Ibid,p.54 9. Bloom, Harold, Thematic Analysis of The Lady of Shallot in Alfred,Lord Tennyson,ed. Bloom, Harold,America:Chelsea House Publising,1999,p.19 10. Poulson, Christine, Death and the Maidens: The Lady of Shallot and the Pre-Raphaelites in Reforming the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical essays,ed Ellen Harding, Bournemouth: Scholar Press,1996,p.183 11. Cumberlege, Geoffrey,ed. Poems of Tennyson:1830- 1870,London:Oxford University Press,1912, reprint 1946,p.53 12. Ibid p.58 13. Ibid p.58

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Waiting for Godot: A Play about Man and Religion

Anupam Santra

“If I knew [What is meant], I would have said so in the play” Samuel Beckett

That the critics had a hard time with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has become one of the sustaining myths of the Beckettian critical industry. What makes the critics most uneasy is not only simply that Beckett seeks to develop a new convention, or that he uses the stage in surprising and innovative ways , but that he threatens to abandon convention and theatricality altogether. Beckett’s theatre seemed unique, and uniquely threatening to most of his fifties’ critics because what he appeared to the stage is nothing. In a review of a performance Anouilh commented “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, its awful” (92). Hobson speaks for many bemused contemporary critics with his comments, in a review of 1955 performance in London, that ‘in course of the play, nothing happens’. He also says that there is no ‘dramatic progress’ and ‘no theatrical tension’(93). The play does not follow any rules of the conventional theatre. so it is not an easy task for the audience as well as critics to understand the play. Philip Hope Wallace’s comment will be pertinent in this context: “The play bored some people acutely.” Godot also presented a second sort of challenge to its critics, which is not reducible to its rejection to established theatrical convention. Gabriel Marcel in his Les Nouvelles Litteraries says that Waiting for Godot is “A play that can be recommended, provided we may clear that there is almost nothing in it that that resembles what we usually call theatre”. But the purpose of this paper is not to make a survey of the critical responses that stress the play’s meaninglessness and nothingness, but to vindicate in my own feeble way that Waiting for Godot is not a play about nothingness but about man and his religion.

Waiting for Godot is a sustained metaphor for modern man and his religion. In support of my argument I would like to quote Brooks Atkinson: “This drama has to convey the impression of some melancholy truth about the hopeless destiny of the human race” (The New York Times). In this play the two tramps – Vladimir and Estragon – are the representatives of modern man. We are assailed by some intriguing questions when we go through the play ―

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Who are Vladimir and Estragon? Where did they come from? Were they all supposed to be normal?

We know that these questions have no definite answers. We really do not know as to where from we came and where we go after our death. In this play, “the particular and contingent features of life in the world dissolve to present us with a concrete image of the universal reality of human existence, common to all culture, reducible to none” (Boxall). To quote Alain Robbe-Grillet: “The human condition is to be there. Probably it is the theatre, more than any other mode of representing reality, which reproduces the situation most naturally” (111). It is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot -

For thine is Life is For thine is the . . . (The Hollow Men)

Eliotian influence is writ large upon the play. Eliot’s Hollow Men try to pray, but fail in their attempt. They can only mumble incoherent bits of Lord’s Prayer. It is impossible for them to utter prayer. Beckett also presents modern men in the same way -

Vladimir: Did you ever read the Bible? Estragon: The Bible… (He reflects.)I must have taken a look at it. Vladimir: Do you remember the Gospel? Estragon: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it make me thirsty. That’s where We’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.

[Act-I]

Man has lost his faith in God and they no longer cling to something reassuring. This has resulted in the loss of vitality, both spiritual and emotional.

The fundamental imagery of Waiting for Godot is Christian. Fresher says: “Waiting for Godot is a modern morality play on permanent Christian theme” (98). As Beckett himself remarked, “Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar, so I naturally use it (qtd. in Duckworth 18). There is frequent use of the biblical allusion in the first act. The story of the ‘two thieves’, ‘the Dead Sea’, ‘John the Baptist’ incorporated into the texture of the play establishes the play’s Christian note. Vladimir’s false alarm concerning Godot’s arrival is suggestive of messianic herald. “The wind in the reeds” echoes Jesus’ remark about John the Baptist:

We went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? . . . But what went ye for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, Which shall prepare thy way before thee [Matthew 11.7-10] (Kristin Morrison 59)

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We can identify Lucky with Christ. The parallels between Christ and Lucky are strong. Lucky chained with a rope, is the humiliated prisoner, much like Jesus who was the prisoner of the Romans after Judas turned him in. Estragon beats, curses, spits on Lucky exactly as the Romans treated Jesus when taking him for Crucifixion. Lucky carries the burden of Pozzo’s bag like a perpetual cross, and he is led to a public fair where he will be mocked. The Romans paraded Jesus on the hill for public scorn. Pozzo, paraphrasing Estragon’s question, then asks a rhetorical question concerning Lucky: ‘why he does not make himself comfortable?’ This question refers specifically to the taunt spectators hurled at Jesus, “save yourself, why don’t you? Come down off the cross if you are God’s son”, and this refers generally to Christ’s mission on earth.

Waiting of the two tramps is symbolic. It refers to man’s anguished waiting for the ‘Second Coming’ of Christ on earth. That the play is concerned with the hope of salvation through the working of grace seems clearly established. According to the Bible Christ came for the salvation of mankind. In this respect we may quote a few lines from the Bible -

For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. . . . They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other (Matthew 24:27, 30b, 31).

From the above discussion we may say that the play rings out with a note of Christian pursuit for an ideal. It is about waiting with a throbbing heart for its fulfillment that never comes. Works cited list

1. Atkinson, Brooks. ‘Review in The Newyork Times’, April 20,1956 Website : http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/reviews/beckett- godot.html 2. Anouilh ,Jean. ‘Review of Waiting for Godot’ in ‘ArtsSpectacles’, 27 february- 5th march 1953, reprint in Graver. 3. Boxall, Peter . ‘Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot/Endgame’,Palgrave Macmillan 4. Brikett, Jennifer. ‘Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett’(Macmillan Masters Guide) 5. Duckworth,Colin. Angels of Darkness : Dramatic Effect in Samuel Beckett with Special Reference to Eugene Inesco. London : Allen,1972 6. Fraser,G.S. ‘Review of Waiting for Godot’, in Times literary Supplement,10 February 1956, reprinted in Graver, 7. Gospel of Matthew, The Holy Bible 8. Hobson , Harold. ‘Review of Waiting for Godot’ in The Sunday Times, 7th August, 1955,reprint in Graver, 9. Marcel,Gabriel;Les Nouvelles Litteraires,15 January 1953

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10. Morrison, Kristin. ‘Biblical Allusion in Waiting for Godot’ in ‘Approaches to Teaching Beckett’s Waiting for Godot’ , June Schlueter and Enoch Barter,ed. EWP 11. Prasad , G.V. ‘Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot’ ; Longman Study Edition 12. http:)// www.guardian.co.uk/the guardian/from-the-archive- blog//2011/may/28/waiting-godot-beckett-1955 13. http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=2707

MIDDLE FLIGHT, journal of the Department of English, Sukumar Sengupta Mahavidyalaya (affiliated to Vidyasagar University), keshpur, Paschim Medinipur, west Bengal, India will be published annually with a view to fulfilling the needs of the academic fraternity comprising the teachers as well as the students. The current issue contains some articles which will, hopefully, cater to the needs of the undergraduate students too. The present volume covers a variety of well thought-out topics belonging to main - stream British Literature as well as the New Literatures in English. Our modest effort will be fruitful if the readers consider it worth reading.

Published: November, 2012

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