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A FEMINIST READING OF SELECT SHORT STORIES OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT AND SADAT HASAN MANTO

THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF Doctor of Philosophy IN ENGLISH

BY ANEYES UL ISLAM

UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROF. SAMI RAFIQ

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY ALIGARH (U.P.), INDIA 2018

Prof. Sami Rafiq Department of English

Department of English Aligarh Muslim University Aligarh - 202002 (INDIA)

Certificate

This is to certify that Mr. ANEYES UL ISLAM has completed his Ph.D. thesis entitled, “A FEMINIST READING OF SELECT SHORT STORIES

OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT AND SADAT HASAN MANTO” under my supervision. To the best of my knowledge, it is his own work. I recommend this thesis for submission for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy in English.

(Prof. Sami Rafiq) Supervisor

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY ALIGARH – 202002

This is to certify that Mr. ANEYES UL ISLAM (Enrolment No.

GH-3375) has completed the following formalities successfully which are required for the submission of a Ph.D. thesis as per the university ordinances.

1. Completion of the Course Work

2. Presentation of Pre-submission Seminar

3. Published two papers based on the thesis

4. Presented two papers in international conferences

(Signature of the Chairperson of the Department)

ANNEXURE I

CANDIDATES’S DECLARATION

I, Aneyes Ul Islam, Department of English, certify that the work embodied in this Ph.D. thesis is my own bonafide work carried out by me under the supervision of Professor Sami Rafiq, Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. The matter embodied in this Ph.D. thesis has not been submitted for the award of any other degree.

I declare that I have faithfully acknowledged, given credit to and referred to the research workers wherever their works have been cited in the text and the body of the thesis. I further certify that I have not wilfully lifted up some other’s work, para, text, data, result etc., reported in the journals, books, magazines, reports, dissertations, thesis, etc., or available at web sites and included them in this Ph.D. thesis and cited as my own work.

(Signature of the candidate) Date: ……………….. ANEYES UL ISLAM ......

Certificate from the Supervisor

This is to certify that the above statement made by the candidate is correct to the best of my knowledge.

………………………… (Signature of the supervisor) PROF. SAMI RAFIQ Department of English A.M.U, Aligarh- India

(Signature of the Chairman of the Department with seal)

ANNEXTRE II

COURSE/ COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION/ PRE- SUBMISSION SEMINAR COMPLETION CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that MR ANEYES UL ISLAM (GH3375), Department of English, has satisfactorily completed the course work/ comprehensive examination and pre-submission seminar requirement which is part of his Ph.D. programme.

Date: ……………… (Signature of the Chairman of the Department)

ANNEXURE III COPYRIGHT TRANSFER CERTIFICATE

Title of the Thesis: A FEMINIST READING OF SELECT SHORT STORIES OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT AND SADAT HASAN MANTO

Candidate’s Name: ANEYES UL ISLAM

The undersigned hereby assigns to the Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh copyright that may exist in and for the above thesis submitted for the award of the Ph.D. degree.

Signature of the Candidate

Note: However, the author may reproduce or authorize others to reproduce material extracted verbatim from the thesis or derivative of the thesis for author’s personal use provide that the source and the University’s copyright notice are indicated ACKNOWLEDGMENT

First of all, I would like to express my sincere and heartfelt thanks to my supervisor, Professor Sami Rafiq, whose experienced guidance, inspirational supervision, and kind support led me to complete my thesis. Her encouraging and erudite suggestions, comprehensive checking and illuminating correction shaped my scholarly inclination during the course of my research.

I am extremely grateful to Professor Asim Siddiqui, the Chairperson, Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, for his consistent support and insightful clarifications and suggestions throughout the course. I am also grateful to Mr. Suhail Ishaque and other members of the staff at the Department of English. I highly appreciate the generous cooperation and the assistance of the staff of Maulana Azad Library, AMU, Aligarh.

I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues, especially Ajaz Ahmad Hajam, Manzoor Ahmad Najar and Mohd. Mohsin Wani who encouraged and supported me throughout this project. I am especially thankful to Firdous Ahmad Mir for proof- reading my thesis.

Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the support and guidance which I received from my uncle, Dr. Mohiudin Zore Kashmiri, and my parents for their unconditional love and care.

Aneyes ul Islam

A FEMINIST READING OF SELECT SHORT STORIES OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT AND SADAT HASAN MANTO

ABSTRACT OF THESIS

SUBMITTED FOR THE AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF

Doctor of Philosophy IN ENGLISH

BY ANEYES UL ISLAM

UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROF. SAMI RAFIQ

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY ALIGARH (U.P.), INDIA

2018

ABSTRACT

This thesis entitled “A Feminist Reading of Select Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant and Sadat Hasan Manto” is an attempt to critically evaluate the short stories of Maupassant and Manto from a comparative feminist perspective. Acknowledged as the masters of modern French and Urdu short story respectively, both the writers have been unconventional and innovative, sceptical and radical in their approach to life, unveiling the hypocrisy of society by highlighting its unbalanced power structures beneath the illusionary and fabricated masks of different power controlling institutions. These dominant institutions against which the writers have raised their voices have been the target of criticism in their stories to highlight the suppression and exploitation of the lower classes of society. Maupassant and Manto speak for these marginalized people, especially prostitutes, towards whom the society has been always indifferent and its different institutions have acted as mediums of exploitation and oppression. Therefore, both the writers have created many memorable characters of female prostitutes whose agony of emotions, bruised soul, heart-wrenching condition, burning agitation, palpable desires and flattering hope is revealed in their stories. Besides their selection of subject and choice of themes, their style and techniques are also what the writers are known for. Since both Maupassant and Manto were prolific short stories writers, they have some three hundred short stories each to their credit, based on the various subjects, which they have claimed to be realistic in approach - a product of their focused observations and experiences. It becomes, therefore, more difficult to draw the parallels and find common threads of thought out of their varied oeuvres. Further, both the writes belonged to the two different literatures, cultures, ages and literary sensibilities. Maupassant lived in the second half of nineteenth-century France, a period that witnessed a radical change not only in social, political, cultural, religious and literary fields, but historians have identified it as a period of gender chaos and masculinity crises. The emergence of „New Woman‟ in the period, a pro-feminist group of woman writers, activists, and reformers, turned upside down the conventional notions about sex, sexuality, gender, class, and patriarchy. Whereas, Sadat Hasan Manto lived in the first half of the twentieth century in India which is known as a „terrain of struggle‟ and this period also led to some drastic changes in every sphere of life. Apart from socio-political changes, the change in the literary ii scene was also significant. First, the introduction of the new genre such as the short story into the Urdu literature; second, a radical change in the subject and content from purely aesthetic to a functional or utilitarian perspective. However, in spite of various differences in cultural, contextual, and literary sensibilities, the short stories of Maupassant and Manto bear great resemblance. For example, the themes like the shortness of human life, sexuality, patriarchal tyranny, socio-political hypocrisy, and economic and sexual exploitation in prostitution etc. have been dealt with by both the writers. Their short stories criticize every kind of socio-political horrors of oppression. Moreover, both the writers have been unconventional to write specifically about the woman, who is sexually exploited, physically victimized, emotionally silenced, and socially marginalized, and when pushed into prostitution, she is commoditized and rendered into an object of pleasure. Their wrath on patriarchal hypocrisy, male double standards, and politicized powerful institutions can be equally seen in their stories. Therefore, it is in this context that Manto‟s critics such as Mumtaz Shireen, Leslie A. Flemming, and many others have considered Manto as „the heir of Maupassant‟ and entitled him as the Maupassant of Urdu literature. Manto himself has acknowledged Maupassant as his fictional and spiritual father. However, the thorough feminist study of the short stories of both the writers has brought forth some contrasting elements, particularly in their representation of female characters. The attitude of Maupassant which one discerns in his stories is predominantly misogynist; whereas, in Manto‟s stories, the sympathetic attitude dominates and overshadows the unconscious misogynist elements, if any. The strong elements of misogyny in Maupassant‟s stories such as “A Public Meeting,” “Allouma” “Marroca,” “Babette,” et cetera have been mostly seen as the result of two major influences on him. First, as also pointed out by one of his critics G. Hainsworth, was the influence of Schopenhauer‟s theories against women. Second, it was the influence of collective attitude of men towards women at the turn of the century, fin de siecle. Particularly, the crises and chaos of sexuality and masculinity by the emergence of feminist progressiveness during the second half of the nineteenth century in France produced copious misogynist literature. Further, in his stories based on his Algerian experiences, the misogynist attitude could be the result of the general consciousness of a colonizer towards native women. In contrast, Manto‟s more sympathetic attitude towards downtrodden women, especially prostitutes, is the iii outcome of his own personal sensitivity, respect, and the changing socio-cultural atmosphere of 1930s and1940s in India. Focusing on the stands both the authors have taken towards the women representation in their stories, the study ventures to draw conclusions which sometimes contrast with the studies done before on the each writer. Moreover, both the writers have written short stories on subjects such as prostitution, sex, and sexuality, which were considered taboos, and consequently had to face various accusations of sensuality, pornography, and obscenity. However, the truth cannot be denied that both the writers wrote voraciously against the social, political, economic, religious and other injustice of women. Through the interpretative method and textual analysis of the short stories, the study employs different theoretical perspectives of feminists and other socialist theorists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Virgina Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and many others to study the dominant themes of both the writers such as sex, sexuality, patriarchy, prostitution, oppression, gaze, stigmatization, partition etc. The close feminist reading of their writings and the similarities and contrasts have shown a more complex and multidimensional representation of the female character who has been presented in many roles; however, her role as a prostitute has been of most interest in the study. As a prostitute, she has various roles to play, the different shades of which can be seen in various stories of the two writers. Sometimes, she becomes the emblem of desire and attraction of patriarchal double standards, and at times she becomes the representative of the entire female sexuality. Her role as a mother, even though it goes against her profession, has been seen as a figure which shatters the conventional docile submissive figure of the mother. Most importantly, she becomes a model for the emancipation of women. Her earning and rebellious nature deconstructs the traditional role of a loyal, submissive, passive, voiceless and objectified „other‟ woman. While Maupassant has aesthetically distanced himself from such issues, but Manto is more concerned and socially involved - first to highlight the issue of female oppression and secondly, by raising a strong voice for female characters to revolt against the oppressive system. As a comparatively feminist study, the concepts of feminist theory as a whole, without applying any particular branch of feminism, are taken into consideration while studying the works of both the writers. Therefore, the study attempts to explore the unexplored area of both the writers, and to point out the oppression, repression, iv and expression of female bodies at various planes and situations presented in their short stories. The present study borrows from feminist theoretical framework wherever it finds useful and attempts to study the stories against the grain. Simone de Beauvoir‟s The Second Sex along with other modern perceptions of female sexuality and representation functions as the background support for the critical analysis of the selected short stories. Particularly, concepts like „sex,‟ „gender,‟ „construction of sexuality,‟ „femininity,‟ institutions of marriage, prostitution, home etc., borrowed from de Beauvoir‟s The Second Sex needs a special mention and acknowledgement. These concepts proved very useful throughout the course of the thesis while studying the select short stories of the two writers. Moreover, the detailed background of each period the two authors lived in also helped in understanding the general notions about art, literature, and female representations in literature; because, both the periods have been seen as critical in the development of female progressiveness and feminism. The thesis, in the course of seven chapters including introduction and conclusion, draws various comparisons and contrasts between Maupassant and Manto. Their essential elements pertaining to the feminist study have been explored in all the chapters. Though this thesis is neither essentially a comparative study nor are the authors studied comparatively in all the chapters; however, it is an attempt to focus on every element of comparison and contrast from the biographical approach to the close reading to their texts. Chapter II and III, and Chapter IV and V are placed in parallel to each other respectively. Chapter VI is the comparative feminist study of the two authors covering their vast thematic reach. Chapter I is the introductory chapter that forms the overall background of the study. It begins with a brief overview of the comparative study of Maupassant and Manto. Since the feminist theory is not being discussed in the major chapters of the thesis, therefore a detailed introduction to feminism, its historical outline and its relation to literature is given in this chapter. Further, it discusses the method of application of the feminist theory on the select short stories, along with the rationale, objectives, and questions to be answered throughout the thesis. Lastly, the chapter division of the thesis is outlined. The second chapter of the thesis titled “A Critical Assessment of the Life and Art of Guy de Maupassant” starts by construction the contextual background of the study. The development of short story criticism is critically reviewed to point out the late nineteenth century as a period of significance. Though the period has produced v the greatest literature of the genre, yet it has been skipped out by the critics of the short story. The chapter further discusses how the new critical insights of the criticism of the genre developed during last decades of the twentieth century. In this regard, most of the important works of short shorty criticism have been discussed very briefly. Next, the chapter attempts to draw a connection between Maupassant‟s personal life and his artistic career. His literary relationship with Gustav Flaubert has been compared with Manto‟s literary relationship with his guide and mentor, Bari Alig. Under Flaubert‟s guidance, Maupassant learned the impersonality of art, writer‟s minute observations, and realistic representation of those observations. The concern with the marginalized section of society, especially prostitutes that Maupassant presented with a sympathetic attitude, was highly appreciated by Flaubert and other critics. Maupassant‟s complex and multi-dimensional personal life has a deep influence on his writings. Therefore, indelible scars of his childhood, his parents‟ unhappy and unfruitful relationship, and his pessimistic outlook as shaped by many European philosophers, particularly Schopenhauer, are briefly related with his overall personality as a writer. The second part of this chapter deals with his art of fiction writing. It discusses his own ideas about art, objectivity, realism, and choice of subject. However, it has been argued, for example, by his critic Faguest that Maupassant has no system, no critical faculty and hardly any ideas, but he has only presented his observations truthfully. For him, art is an indivisible whole and to be faithful to it is to present life truthfully, without hiding least of it. Joseph Conrad also talks about how Maupassant dealt with the „facts‟ observable to his eyes, and according to Tolstoy, Maupassant preferred senses rather than the spirit. Whereas, De Burry calls him physiologist - the man of the amphitheatre, who like a surgeon knows how to handle nerves, and even called him an artist cum scientist. According to Madame de Lafayette Maupassant knows as much as he guesses. Lastly, the chapter also talks about the critical attacks on Maupassant‟s short stories, particularly, for his choice of subject and characters. However, the multiplicity of his subjects and themes is his real achievement as mentioned by his biographer and critic Steegmuller. As such this chapter is the total sum of Maupassant‟s life, works, and art. vi

The third chapter of the thesis entitled as “The Life and Art of Manto,” set in parallel to the chapter II, starts with an introduction to the Urdu short story, the dominant genre of the first half of the twentieth century. The short story in Urdu literature has developed from one of the oldest forms of narration called Dastan and became the most experimental genre later on in the century. Among the four pillars of the Urdu short story, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Ismat Chugtai, and Manto, who are also known as progressive writers for their contribution in bringing literature closer to reality, Manto was most innovative, experimental and radical. He wrote on those subjects for which many of his critics accused him of obscenity and pornography. Manto‟s relation with Progressive Association Movement is also discussed in great detail, pointing out his complexity of character and works that led an ambiguous conclusion of this relationship. Manto‟s life and writings become the next focus of this chapter. His life, shortly discussed in the chapter, has been essential in understanding his works. His literary relationship with Bari Alig is discussed in comparison with the relationship between Maupassant and Flaubert. Manto has himself acknowledged the fact that it was only Bari Alig who turned Sadat Hasan into Manto. Manto started his literary career as a translator and it was in this period that his mentor Bari Alig introduced him to the world‟s greatest writers. He read Maupassant and was influenced by his art and style of writing. His hundreds of short stories mark his contribution equal to Maupassant and therefore, has been called as Maupassant of Urdu literature by Mumtaz Sheerin. This chapter further discusses, in detail, Manto‟s ideas and style of writing. According to him, literature does not exist in a vacuum. As a realist, like Maupassant, his every story is the result of his realistic presentation of society. However, if the society seems grim and dark and full of dirt, Manto says it is not his fault; rather, it is the society itself which is dirty and naked. He writes on a blackboard with white chalk only to highlight the blackness of the board (society). He has only exposed the hypocrisy of society without giving any solution because, according to him, it was not his job. Moreover, this chapter is an attempt to understand Manto‟s complex personality through his stories. He has been called a kind-hearted terrorist by Abu Said Quraishi, which also points out the conflict in his personality and his revolt against the conventional oppressive norms. Humanism was his religion and he vii believed that religion might divide people but humanisms would continue to survive. His favourite characters are those women who have been the target of all patriarchal oppression and exploitation, yet raise their voices and rebel against the system. The depiction of women, belonging to the underprivileged class, particularly prostitutes such as Sogandhi, Sultana, Neti, Janki, Mozil etc., clearly proves his sympathetic concern towards them. Further, his realistic approach towards life and society and truthful representation in his stories is the only distinguishing characteristic that made his stories immortal and relevant to all ages. “Intricate Portrait of Female Sexuality: A Feminist Reading of the Select Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant” is the title of the fourth chapter of the thesis. It is an extensive feminist reading of Maupassant‟s short stories which begins by discussing a very critical phenomenon of fin de siècle. With the emergence of „New Woman,‟ the period witnessed some drastic changes and upheavals in the gender divisions. As a result of masculinity crises and gender chaos, the literature of the period became the platform for both constructing the negative representations of woman and deconstruction of already existing binaries and gendered divisions. The „new woman‟ thus shattered the idealized figure of the „angle in the house‟. The woman in her new active and multi-dimensional role not only became the protagonist and new voice of woman literature but also of various male writers. Maupassant was well aware of the female progressive movement and therefore, his short stories are also full of these female characters. In this chapter, Maupassant‟s complex and multidimensional representation of female characters is discussed by highlighting the ambiguity in his own personality. Though critics have called him a misogynist, yet there are numerous examples from his stories wherein he has sympathetically portrayed female characters, their empowerment and the socio-political injustice and oppression through many powerful institutions. However, some of his stories such as “A Public Meeting,” “Allouma” and “Marroca” are filled with misogynistic and racial stereotypes. But in one of the masterpiece stories “Useless Beauty”, he discusses how a woman fights for her equality and avenges her oppression. In this story, the writer‟s satirical attitude towards patriarchal system is quite obvious. Secondly, as himself a macho figure, he has presented many macho characters, especially stressing on the conventional masculinity myth. For example moustaches in his short stories such as “The Moustache” and “Bed No. 29” are presented as a symbol of virility and manliness. viii

Maupassant has also presented a unique perspective on how money and passion, avarice and jealousy, physical beauty and physical suffering have been dominant influences on humanity. But for both Maupassant and Manto though humanity is mad, greedy, licentious and stupid, yet it is beautiful. The study discussed how women have been presented as the victims of patriarchy, and the literature has been one of the tools for portraying her as a source of chaos and evil. In Maupassant‟s short stories such as “Boule de Suif” and “La Maison Tellier,” the prime concentration is the rehabilitation of the prostitutes whom the bourgeois hypocrite society considers as evildoers, but their inner nature is shown as pure and innocent. This contrast between classes and their deeper reality is foregrounded throughout his stories on the subject of prostitution. Maupassant further shows how men used to judge women by their „virtues‟ and how the creation of „other‟ would help them to define their own position. Her „body-object‟ is rendered as a weak voiceless submissive entity by the patriarchal capitalist bourgeois men and women. The analysis of various other stories in this chapter further reveals Maupassant‟s insight into woman victimization. “The Diamond Necklace” shows the economic dependence of women in the nineteenth-century, and its protagonist is an example of the nineteenth-century French version of a desperate housewife. Woman‟s sexual exploitation is rooted in economic inequality and deprivation. As noted by Simone de Beauvoir, “Her social oppression [including sexuality exploitation] is the consequence of her economic oppression” (64). “The Diamond Necklace” also highlights that women have been always treated unequally, particularly in economic matters. His other stories such as “The Story of a Farm-Girl,” “The Useless Beauty,” “In the Moonlight,” “A Family,” “A Cock Crowed,” “Woman‟s Wiles,” “The Signal,” and “A Philosopher,” “Monsieur Parent,” “A Passion,” “Bertha” etc. have been thoroughly analysed from feminist perspective. Most of these stories talk about oppression, sexual exploitation, social othering, while in other stories women have been portrayed as rebellious against their “brutal masters”. Lastly, the chapter also brings into notice some of the critics who have criticized Maupassant for his misogynist female representation - woman as incomprehensible, unreasonable, and perfidious. The fifth chapter of the thesis “Woman in different Shades from Prostitution to the Partition: Reading Manto‟s Stories from Feminist Perspective” is based on the same pattern as followed in the previous chapter on Maupassant. It starts with ix

Manto‟s proposition on prostitutes that “prostitutes are not born, they are made,” which like Simon de Beauvoir‟s claim that woman is not born, rather becomes one, stresses on the socially constructed nature of female sexuality and identity. Prostitution is the dominant theme in his stories. Based on his realistic observations and experiences, these stories target various male-dominated social institutions such as marriage, prostitution and other socio-political institutions and therefore, highlight their hypocrisy and double standards. A feminist reading of Manto‟s short stories exposes various stark realities of women‟s situation in society, victimized and exploited through different power controlling institutions. The chapter deals with those short stories of Manto which thus question the hierarchical social system. These stories led critics to call him pornographer, reactionary, diseased mind etc. Essentially, these stories deal with female sexuality which has been constructed over time throughout history. Manto is the first short story writer in Urdu literature who has presented female sexuality in prostitution in a unique way, revealing both the physical and psychological forms of its exploitation. For example, short stories such as “Insult,” “Black Shalwar,” “Sharida,” “Odour,” “Cold Meet,” “Mozil,” “Mami,” “Janki,” “Babu Gopinath,” “Behind the Reed Stalks,” “Pairan,” “Basit,” “Smoke,” “Open it,” “Hundred Candle Power Bulb,” “License,” “Khushiyan,” “Ten Rupees” etc. have been thoroughly analysed from feminist perspective. Besides highlighting exploitation, these short stories present the life of prostitute having a unique identity as she is engaged in earning and also enjoys the choice better than a domestic wife. As also observed by Wazir Agha, in his analysis of Manto‟s short stories, the coin earned by the women is opposite to the coin of the paternal rule. Further, Manto believes that every prostitute has an aspect of woman living inside her, who is religious, honest, and has an ego that often gets hurt. This belief can be seen in “Insult,” a story which relates Sugandhi‟s rebellion against the system. Her wounded ego and self-respect erupts into fire and burns all the meshes woven around her by men. Her rebellion takes its extreme form when she sleeps beside a mangy dog, and this becomes a satire on man‟s loyalty. Therefore, stories like “Insult” deal with the identity and existential crises of prostitutes who are not willingly in this trade, rather they too want to have a respectful life and crave for love. But society has been pivotal in pushing them into this unending circle of sexual exploitation. Manto‟s story “License” needs a special mention in this context. This story unveils the horrific face x of patriarchy in its subjugation of woman and construction of binaries. This heart rendering story probes deep into patriarchal society and highlights the inequality and injustice done to women. It narrates Niti‟s struggle in her life when her husband passed away. She drives a chariot, but on a complaint, she is ordered that being a woman she cannot have a license to drive. She argues with the officer that she has to drive to earn money to survive. On this, the officer replies very weirdly and disgracefully to her, saying that she should go to the bazaar and find herself a spot, and that way she might make more of it. Manto has drawn a significant number of other female prostitute characters and their characterization is both complex and sympathetic because he has demystified the conventional notions of morality and chastity. These stories hold up a mirror to society‟s double standards in matters of sexual morality by which female sexuality has been ignored, demonized, and constructed. Another aspect of these characters that Manto stresses is their alienation even though they live in busy streets and crowded apartments. In this sinful business of flesh, Manto has presented these prostitutes as religious. The woman inside a prostitute cannot be bought and sold is perhaps the greatest message Manto has given in his story “Insult”. Further, the different roles played by a prostitute are worth appreciating in Manto‟s stories. A prostitute has been presented in different shades: she is a kind-hearted mother, a sympathetic neighbour, a loving friend, an honest partner, and a good human being. Another subject besides prostitution for which Manto‟s stories are known is the partition. Manto‟s partition stories are also critically evaluated in this chapter to highlight the stigmatization of gendered violence during the partition of India. In his story “Khol Do” (Open it), Manto has slapped on the face of humanity and showed how the patrons of humanity have turned into brutal perpetrators of violence overnight. He has shown the gendered aspect of the violence of partition. Many feminists nowadays analyze the history of partition from women‟s perspective, focusing particularly on the violence against women during the partition. For example, writers like Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, and Kamala Bhasin have highlighted the untold stories of rape, mutilation, and abduction of women, and literature has served so much in exposing the hidden patriarchal and politicized gendered violence. In “Open it” Manto has portrayed a young girl who went through the extreme human brutality and is terrified beyond imagination or conscious. The terror is so grave that she unconsciously responds to the doctor‟s words “open it” by xi untying the cord holding her shalwar. Manto‟s another partition story “Cold Meat” also deals with the oppression and sexual exploitation of women. The central character of the story is unnamed, without any existence “a beautiful girl,” a representative of all those innocent and silenced women who became the victims of rape and atrocity of men during the partition of the subcontinent. The story has been interpreted as a psychological revenge that the dead body of the victim takes against Isher Singh by rendering him sexually impotent. Lastly, Manto‟s partition stories, for which Priyamvada Gopal has used Walter Benjamin‟s formulation “documents of barbarism,” pathetically describe the gendered violence, and show how the wall between „patriarchal violence‟ and „patriarchal protection‟ vanished in the partition of 1947. Lastly, the chapter discusses Manto‟s conscious efforts for women equality. He wanted that women should enjoy equality in every spare of life and should walk shoulder to shoulder to man. For example, in “Ismat Chughtai”, one of the Manto‟s best character sketches, he wants every woman in the world to be bold like Ismat Chughtai. They should be given equality in every field of life without assaulting their identity and self-respect. The last chapter of the thesis is entitled as “Representing Female Sexuality through Male Gaze: A Comparative Study of the Select Short Stories of Maupassant and Manto from Feminist Perspective”. It is a comparative study of the vast thematic reach of both the writers from a feminist perspective. Particularly, it focuses on the various dominant issues related to female sexuality in their stories. Whether it is the theme of prostitution, sex or sexuality, both the writers have a lot of similarities in their views; however, their differences also find a significant role in this chapter. The chapter is divided into many subsections. First, the chapter begins with an overview of the female sexuality and its representation in general and in the times of both the writers in particular, in order to mark out the context of the study - the socio-political revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century in France and the „terrain of struggle‟ in the first half of the twentieth century in India. Second, Manto‟s individuality and the western influence, particularly of Maupassant, are discussed in order to create a sense of semblance among the two writers. Third, the modern tendencies in their writings, especially those which promote female emancipation, are highlighted. Fourth, this chapter very extensively discusses the masculinity crises, the theme both the short story writers have dealt with. Particularly this theme has been xii observed in Maupassant‟s stories written in defence of conventional masculinity when it was questioned by New Woman writers. These stories prove significant regarding the gender construction and objectification of female sexuality through the male gaze. Fifth, the multifaceted and multidimensional representation of female sexuality has been described by both storytellers from a unique point of view. Sixth, the female representation through different institutions is analyzed in comparison to each other. These power controlling institutions such home, prostitution, politics, and religion (partition in Manto‟s case) have been only oppressors of female sexuality in different forms. This section has been further divided into subsections, discussing separately some of these patriarchal institutions. For example, the sexualized home, in which the role of the husband and wife are gender-based and some chores are considered as masculine, while others as strictly feminine. Therefore, marriage becomes a kind of prostitution. This thin layer between the marriage and prostitution has been also pointed out by Manto in his nonfiction “Ismat Faroshi” (prostitution) when he says that when a woman loses her most gifted ornament and with it, she also loses her respect in society. He says that this jewel or ornament (metaphorically referring to woman‟s virtue) can be lost in many ways: “after marriage, thanks to her husband; sometimes a man takes it from her forcibly, sometimes out of wedlock; when she surrenders it willingly to the man she loves; sometimes she sells it when circumstances compel her and sometimes she trades in it” (412-13 Radha). Therefore, it is evident that both prostitution, in which she trades her virtue, and marriage are grouped into the same category, because in both cases she loses her most precious ornament, as Manto would call it. However, he adds that this virtue cannot be sold again and again, as it is commonly said about the prostitutes and are designated as „virtue-selling”. Lastly, in Chapter VII “Conclusion”, the overall conclusion of the study has been pointed out that literature as a platform can be a powerful instrument for both constructing and deconstructing identities, social structures, and binary oppositions. Similarly, Maupassant and Manto‟s fiction can be read from both stances respectively. Since, the subject of sexuality has remained their main focus, their stories have brought out many layers of it, which reminds of a very thorough observation of Nancy Armstrong: “the history of the novel cannot be understood apart from the history of sexuality, and the history of sexuality is also constructed in the pages of fiction” (9). Since many critics have found a strong element of misogyny in xiii

Maupassant‟s stories, the study has unveiled how masculinity myth has been defended and the female sexuality constructed in his fiction. Elizabeth Nolan has also qualified Maupassant‟s fiction as denoting an “androcentric position” and engaging in a “masculinist discourse” (123). In contrast, Manto‟s short stories have been proved seminal in shattering the binaries created throughout the male discourse of sexuality. Through this feminist study of his stories, it is found that Manto‟s short stories highlight the double standards of male discourse, the plight of women under patriarchy, and the creation of male-dominated institutions. His short stories question the gender inequality without ignoring the biological differences. In his famous sketch “Ismat Chughtai” Manto has pointed out: “Let the women fight head and shoulders with men on the battlefields, let them excavate mountains, let them become story- writers like Ismat Chughtai, but their palms should be adorned with henna” (205 BM). In the same sketch, he further points out the nature of the social construction of biological difference as: “I consider it vulgar to label people as “man” or “woman.” It is ridiculous to put up signboards on mosques and temples declaring that they are houses of worship. But from an architectural point of view, when we compare them with residential dwellings we do not ignore their sacred character” (Manto, BM 212).

Works Cited Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany- Chevallier. London: Vintage Books, 2011. Print. Manto, Sadat Hasan. Black Margins: Sa’ad Hasan Manto Stories. Ed. Muhammad Umar Memon. Sel. M. Asaduddin. New Delhi: Katha, 2001. Print. ---. My Name is Radha: The Essentials of Manto. Trans. Muhammad Umar Memon. New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2015. Print.

CONTENTS

Certificates

Annexures: I-III

Dedication

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Page No.

Chapter I Introduction 1- 37

Chapter II A Critical Assessment of the Life and Art of Guy de Maupassant 38- 70

Chapter III The Life and Art of Manto 71- 108

Chapter IV Intricate Portrait of Female Sexuality: A Feminist Reading of the Select Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant 109- 152

Chapter V Woman in Different Shades from Prostitution to the Partition: Reading Manto’s Stories from a Feminist Perspective 153- 205

Chapter VI Representing Female Sexuality through Male Gaze: A Comparative Study of the Select Short Stories of Maupassant and Manto from Feminist Perspective 206- 266

Chapter VII Conclusion 267- 277

Bibliography 278- 305 List of Abbreviations

The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant TCSSM

Short Stories of the Tragedy and Comedy of Life SSTCL

A Life: The Humble Truth Life

Pierre and Jean P&J

The Complete Works of Guy De Maupassant TCWM

Kuliyat-e-Sadat Hasan Manto Kuliyat

Black Margins: Sa’ad Hasan Manto Stories BM

Naked Voices: Stories & Sketches NV

My Name is Radha: The Essentials of Manto Radha

The Best of Manto TBM

Kingdom’s End and Other Stories Kingdom

Partition: Sketches and Stories Partition

Black Milk: A Collection of Short Stories Black Milk

Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition MD

Manto: Select Stories MSS

Why I Write: Essays by Sadat Hasan Manto WIR

CHAPTER I

Introduction

Outline

This chapter is a melting-pot of all the major issues that this study is dealing with. It starts with an overview of the comparative study of Maupassant and Manto, outlining a brief literature review of the comparative studies of each writer. It also introduces the literary theory of Feminism and its relationship with literature, especially how both have been influential platforms to construct and deconstruct binary oppositions and other socially politicized structures. The introductory chapter, further, gives the rationale of the study, and explains the use of the feminist theory to study the short stories of Maupassant and Manto. Some questions are raised and discussed very briefly, which the study aims to answer. Lastly, the chapter division of the thesis has been outlined.

1. A Comparative Study of Maupassant and Manto: An Overview

The works of Guy de Maupassant and Sadat Hasan Manto have been extensively studied and a lot of research has been done on them. Both the writers have been compared with other great writers of the world. While Maupassant has been compared to Gustav Flaubert, Anton Chekhov, Emile Zola, Somerset Maugham, Maxim Gorky, Ernest Hemingway, O. Henry etc., a lot of comparative studies have been done on Manto as well. His works have been compared with those of Ismat Chugtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Munshi Premchand etc. Beyond the boundaries of Urdu literature, Manto‟s stories have been equated with those of Maupassant, Anton Chekov, O. Henry, and D. H. Lawrence for their experimental and innovative subject matter and style.

Maupassant, evaluated alongside all his contemporary writers, has emerged as the best of the really “popular” short story writers. His name shines brighter than O. Henry. Owing to his clarity of expression, Maupassant‟s style of writing has always been more direct and immediate, less subtle and oblique, than Chekhov‟s. The 2 comparison between Maupassant‟s simple and Chekhov‟s oblique writings has been done by Herbert Ernest Bates, a fiction writer and critic, in his book The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey. Further, in her book Manto: Nuri nah Nari, Mumtaz Shireen, a critic of Manto, says while comparing Maupassant with Chekov: “If Maupassant has „body‟, the „soul‟ is with Chekov. So, with Maupassant, there is a natural, agitated passion and excitement, whose relation is with the body, and Chekov has the taste of the human soul” (118-19, Self trans.). Harold Bloom in his introduction to Guy de Maupassant quotes Lev Shestov, a remarkable Russian religious thinker of the earlier twentieth century, who compares Maupassant‟s art with the immortal art of Chekhov. It reads thus:

Chekhov‟s wonderful art did not die—his art to kill by a mere touch, a breath, a glance, everything whereby men live and wherein they take their pride. And in the art, he was constantly perfecting himself, and he attained to virtuosity beyond the reach of any of his rivals in European literature. Maupassant often had to strain every effort to overcome his victim. The victim often escaped from Maupassant, though crushed and broken, yet with his life. In Chekhov‟s hands, nothing escaped death. (qtd. in Bloom 11)

Even though Maupassant had widely influenced Chekhov, yet the fact cannot be denied that Chekhov at times surpassed the greatness of Maupassant. They have been accurately weighted by Lev Shestov as one might weight Christopher Marlowe against Shakespeare (Bloom 11).

Manto‟s stories are thematically cosmic, all-inclusive, revolutionary, candid, blunt, and radical. Stylistically, they are lucid but innovative, experimental, well- structured, close-knit and open-ended, that makes Manto the most unique and distinctive short story writer in Urdu literature. Often compared with Ismat Chugtai, his stories talk about sex and sexuality, oppression and exploitation; however, Manto is considered more experimental and innovative, while Ismat, more rebellious. A lot of research has been done on both the writers, analyzing their representation of women and the feminist undercurrents in their works. Similarly, Dr. Kehkashan Parveen in Manto and Bedi: Takabuli Mutalla (Manto and Bedi: A Comparative Study), while comparing the life and works of Manto and Bedi, concludes that both the writers have equally and realistically presented sexuality and psychology of their 3 characters; however, Manto has talked about sexuality more outspokenly and honestly than Bedi. Besides, Manto has also been compared with European masters of the short story. For example, Dr. Riaz Qadeer‟s dissertation Maupassant and Manto: A Comparative Study bridges the gap between the literatures of East and West. The author has comprehensively compared the art and works of Maupassant and Manto. Though Mumtaz Shireen and Leslie A. Flemming have also compared the two writers, the former asserts that Manto is a true disciple of Maupassant by calling him „the Maupassant of India‟.

This thesis is a feminist comparative study and a thorough analysis of the life, works and the female representation in the short stories of Maupassant and Manto. Their short stories reflect experiences, observations, thinking, thought processes, and the overall condition of their respective times which the two writers observed very intimately and minutely to highlight the naked truths of life. As far as the representation of women is concerned, in Manto‟s stories, the woman is marginalized, a “displaced space” (Mann 127). Sometimes, she becomes a symbol of national destruction, a micro socio-political map of the partition of India; while, on the other hand, in Maupassant‟s often-considered misogynistic short stories, she is portrayed as a helpless prostitute, wicked wife, and a patriotic citizen. Sometimes, she is an idealized „Angel in the House‟ but at times she becomes a threat to masculinity, which has been a major theme of literature in fin de siècle, „a period of sexual scandals‟ (Showalter, SA 3).

Whether it is the structure of form or the choice of subject, the majority of the Manto‟s critics have accepted the influence of Maupassant on him. This influence can be seen in most of his stories and, particularly, in their shocking and ironical open- endings. The space that is given to the marginalized low-life characters and controversial themes like sex, human relationships and prostitution are what Manto is known for, which are also a prominent aspect of Maupassant‟s stories. Therefore, Manto has not only adopted Maupassant‟s techniques but his themes are also quite similar, with only some differences which are obviously the result of their generation gap, cultural and contextual differences, and influence of literary sensibilities. For example, the themes of the shortness of human life, sexuality, patriarchal tyranny, socio-political hypocrisy, and economic and sexual exploitation through prostitution etc. have been dealt by both the writers. Their short stories criticize every kind of 4 socio-political horror and oppression. Like Maupassant, Manto‟s stories also depict the human personality as full of evils and animal instincts. Even though both strongly believed in humanism, yet their attitudes towards women are a contrast to each other. Contrary to the representation of female characters by Maupassant, Manto has stressed on the hidden human aspect of a woman in a prostitute. He believed that every prostitute has a woman inside her who has been always overshadowed by society for being a prostitute and her entire existence has been defined by her body. However, we have other female characters created by him who are neither prostitutes nor rebels. Yet they too struggle for female freedom from male authoritarianism, chauvinism, and all other kinds of gendered oppression.

The subject of woman, with all social, political, sexual, religious and domestic aspects, is the major concern in the writings of both Maupassant and Manto. Their short stories, particularly, talk about the different roles that a woman performs in a society which is fundamentally patriarchal. Maupassant unveils the hypocrisy of high- class society; whereas, Manto peels off the reality of the lower-class people and shows the naked truth of their lives. However, women characters have also been presented with sympathetic concern by both the writers, even though, their representation slightly varies. In this context, a critic, Parvaiz Shaharyar, has illustrated thus:

Kulwant Kaur and Mozil are neither like Maupassant‟s extremely beautiful and high-class female characters and nor are their identities created by their physical beauty; they don‟t have beautiful eyes and long hair…But these less beautiful women are, of course, healthy as far as their physique is concerned…These women cannot bear any kind of cheating, deception or co-partnership in their love. Although their hearts are filled with sympathy for others, they strongly hate sanctimony. Each can sacrifice her life in love, and she can also take a life in the fire of revenge and hatred. (65, Self trans.)

Both similarities and contrasts, therefore, become the part of any comparative study, whether or not the select writers belong to the same language, literature, and culture. Although the concerns regarding women in the stories of both the writers are similar, their representations differ in various aspects. Manto portrayed the rebellious aspect of female characters, which, according to some critics such as Shamasur 5

Rehman Farooqi and Harveen Mann, Manto failed in stories like “Open it” and “Cold Meat”; but, his overall concern was to bring the marginalized women into the limelight which he did successfully. In contrast, Maupassant‟s concern with his female characters is less sympathetic than Manto‟s. It is because of these concerns that Manto is being compared with Maupassant, and not because of his consciously seeking to emulate the French short story writer. He, like Maupassant, aimed to expose societal ills and hypocrisies of life without losing faith in the inherent beauty within human beings. As Edward Daniel Sullivan in his book Maupassant: The Short Stories accurately sums up regarding Maupassant‟s stance on exposing the ills and deceptions of society: “In a world where falsity masquerades as truth and blind chance rules, not even the clarity of the artist‟s eye is any guard against the deceptions and risks of life; all one can do is expose again and again the drama of deceit” (20).

Thus, in the context of comparing the two writers‟ short stories from a feminist theoretical perspective, an attempt has also been made to bridge the gap between the two different kinds of literatures and cultures: firstly, by pointing out the similarities and contrasts; secondly, by stating the relevance of the two authors to the present times. Another purpose of the study would be the inclusion of other literature (as one of the important elements of comparative literature) into the canon of world literature. Therefore, the study attempts to see the marginalized literature such as Urdu literature equally significant and prove that no literature is less important than an other.

2. Feminism: An Introduction

Feminist literary theory and criticism does not need any introduction as from the last seventy years or so its impact has been so profound and widespread that it has shaped many academic and non-academic disciplines including linguistics, philosophy, history, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, film and media studies, cultural studies, musicology, geography, economics, law etc. The basic subject of its study is Woman, who according to Virginia Woolf is “the most discussed animal in the universe” (27). Be it a subject of theoretical, philosophical, religious, social, cultural, political, economic or any other related issue, she has always been discussed, defined, ruled, projected, portrayed, displayed and differentiated by Man, and throughout the course of history, she has been very 6 intricately transformed from „female‟ to „woman‟, from biological to a gendered construction.

One of the aspects of feminism is to study the representations of women in literature and other art forms—how they have been presented, especially when the author is male and has written in a patriarchal social context and background. Feminists from time to time have been drastically engaged in unveiling the patriarchal discourse under the umbrella of which woman‟s existence and sexuality has been shaded and rendered into something which has only served man to justify his oppression and superiority over her. In other words, feminists strive to deconstruct the discourse of male ideology in order to emancipate woman from the shackles of male dominance.

Fundamentally, feminism as a theory or set of theories has aimed at the equality of women who have been, treated inequitably in a society that is structured according to patriarchy, prioritizing male viewpoints and concerns. Women, considered as the „Others,‟ have been denied equal access to seek public concerns as well as cultural representations. Feminism seeks to change this biased structure of the patriarchal society. These unequal structures and man-made bondages for women have been going on from times immemorial; however, feminists of different ages have been trying to raise their voices against the male-domination and oppression. There has been many manifestations of feminism starting around 1550 till now, whereby feminists attempted to contend with patriarchy, whether by writing or participating in public debates. The prevailing idea of women as an inferior branch of the human race was the biggest challenge for earlier feminists. Men have been quoting from the Holy Bible and other Epistles of St. Paul to prove woman as the successor of Eve. She has been labelled as „Posterior et inferior’ (last and lesser), thus inferior to men, as Aristotelian philosophy would deem. She has been conceived as the first transgressor, hence the root of all evil. She was barred from public interaction, and even her education, if allowed, was only confined to the private and domestic sphere.

The struggle for emancipation and equality of women did not start a few decades or a century or two ago; rather women in every age have been engaged in the struggle, and history has witnessed the fact. For example, in Britain, writers such as Mary Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and George Eliot; in 7

France, revolutionary journalists and cultural critics from Frances Power Cobbe to Millicent Garrett Fawcett; in America, radical and outspoken women from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Louisa May Alcott, from Margaret Fuller to Sojourner Truth expressed a discourse of subjectivity as against the patriarchal objectification, gender construction, and oppression. In fact, the contribution of Wollstonecraft to female emancipation is enough to prove that women have always raised questions against the authoritarian figure of a man in society. Whether it was Edmund Burke‟s sentimental „aestheticisation of beauty‟ or Rousseau‟s construction of an ideal virtuous woman or even the flawed misogynist construction of Milton‟s Eve, Wollstonecraft exposed the constructed nature of both the femininity and masculinity.In her time “the outburst of writing by women” was the result of “continuing constraints as well as new freedoms” (Wilcox 37). Such proto-feminists simply by thinking, writing and „living‟ challenged the male structured norms governing gender.

Although feminism as a movement proper began during the 1960s, yet there were many women writers who wrote long before on woman‟s equality and other social, political and economic rights. Feminists, like Jane Anger in her first piece of feminist polemic, Her Protection for Women (1589), put a totally different gloss upon Genesis. She refuted the notion of „posterior et inferior’ by pointing out a contrary statement that God‟s creation of Eve is last and best. Similarly, other feminist writers such as Aemilia Lanyer in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) (Hail, God, King of the Jews), Esther Sowernam in Ester Hath Hang’d Haman (1617), Margaret Fox in Women’s Speaking Justified (1667) and Sarah (Fyge) Egerton in The Female Advocate (1686) raised their voices against prevailing inequalities. Furthermore, Mary Astell in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) also talked about binary oppositions created by society and its various authoritarian institutions. During the latter half of the seventeenth century, writers and poets like Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Anne Finch, took up the subject of female friendship which was then considered a taboo.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft marked the beginning of modern feminism, though at first the book was received poorly. As a response to Edmund Burke‟s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), it talks about the education of women from which they were constrained. She desires that women be given equal position in society and marriage, as they could be companions 8 to their husbands, rather than mere subordinate wives. It is one of the major feminist books which talk about the rights of women by highlighting their present position in the male-constructed society. The period following the Vindication was largely a period of reaction which produced books like Mrs Sarah Ellis‟s immensely successful Women of England (1839). This was followed by The Mothers of England (1842) and The Daughters of England (1843), and Hannah More‟s writings on female education (Sanders 16). William Thompson‟s Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men (1825) is a strong disapproval and a stern reply against the contempt expressed in “Essay on Government” (1821) by James Mill against women. Further, various activists fought against many unequal laws and acts regarding marriage, divorce, and property.

In the modern period, feminism touched its zenith through two groundbreaking works—A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir—which influenced a whole generation of feminist theorists and activists after that. Both Woolf and Beauvoir not only propounded the feminist ideas and notions about subjectivity, identity, gender division, construction of binaries etc. but they also inspired and encouraged feminists from Kate Millett to Judith Butler, who, later supported by postmodern and other postcolonial theories, revolutionized feminist literary criticism.

Moreover, the year 1970 marks an explosion of feminist writings. Kate Millett‟s Sexual Politics, Shulamith Firestone‟s The Dialectic of Sex and Robin Morgan‟s edited collection Sisterhood is Powerful in the USA, Germaine Greer‟s The Female Eunuch and Eva Figes‟ Patriarchal Attitudes in Britain have been very influential in the history of feminism. But for understanding the wave of theoretical writings, it is pertinent to start with Simone de Beauvoir‟s The Second Sex (1949) because all the theoretical works of the 1970s are based on her account of the cultural construction of woman as the other. According to Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman…No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine” (301). In the USA, Betty Friedan‟s The Feminine Mystique (1963), like The Second Sex, also demanded a “drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity that will permit women to reach maturity, identity, completeness of self” 9

(qtd. in Thornham 30). The phrase „Sexual Politics‟ was popularized by Millett in her book Sexual Politics in which she, in addition to other theoretical concerns, also discussed the term „patriarchy‟ and broadened its definition beyond the rule of a dominant elder male within a traditional kinship structure to mean the institutionalized oppression of all women by all men. According to Millett, patriarchy is a political institution and sex is a “status category with political implications” (qtd. in Thornham 31).

Feminism in America started slowly with the activism of the anti-slavery movement. While anti-slavery and other anti-racial discrimination movements were at their height, feminist theorists and activists in America also began to campaign for the modification of the divorce laws, married women‟s property rights, and the right to vote. Theorists like Sarah Grimke and Margaret Fuller produced influential works like Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838) and Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) respectively.

In Britain, Juliet Mitchell‟s essay “Women: the Longest Revolution” which appeared in New Left Review in 1966, was a response to the publication of The Long Revolution by Marxist critic Raymond Williams in 1961, in which he adopts a complete silence on the woman question while discussing the different aspects of the „long revolution‟—the „democratic revolution,‟ the „industrial revolution,‟ and the revolutionary expansion of communication technologies (Thornham, “SWF” 32). Mitchell writes against the complete silence adopted by Williams on the subject of women. In this essay and later in the book Woman’s Estate, she attacks Marxism‟s failure to offer any materialist analysis of female oppression. Similarly, Sheila Rowbotham‟s Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World published in 1973 argues for both revolution in consciousness and a historical analysis of female oppression within capitalism. Women, she argues, have to struggle for control over both production and reproduction. Moreover, she, like Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf, also demanded a revolution within the language and cultural settings, leading to the change in material structures. She is of the view that socialist feminists must seek to transform „the inner world‟ of bodily experience, psychological colonization, and cultural silencing, as well as the outer world of material social conditions. Thus all the feminists of The Second Wave believed that women were conquered psychologically, politically and economically by men. Moreover, they identified Freudian 10 psychoanalysis as a key agent in the „counterrevolution‟ against the first wave feminism (Thornham, “SWF” 33).

In France, French feminism emerged out of a „politicized climate‟. The French feminists were following psychoanalysis along with various shades of Marxism as they understood it as an explanatory tool. As pointed out by Toril Moi, the year 1968 produced “an exuberant political optimism among left-wing intellectuals in France” and in this “politicized intellectual climate, dominated by various shades of Marxism...that the first French feminist groups were formed” (95). However, Kate Millett denounced Freud as a key agent of patriarchy. French theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva followed de Beauvoir‟s analysis of woman‟s construction as the „Other‟ and further attempted to unveil how language and culture created sexual binaries. And for this matter, the French psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan‟s analysis of an infant‟s entry into the culture and its identification of self and other, and its entry into the „Symbolic Order‟ via the acquisition of language, was of significant value to French feminists to understand the basic nature of patriarchy. They found this symbolic order essentially patriarchal in which the constructions of binary oppositions are given meanings whereby the term „male‟ is always privileged. Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva, therefore, struggled for female identity, language, and writing, in various ways, to subvert and deconstruct the phallocentricity of the Symbolic Order.

Feminism is an umbrella term which covers a wide range of feminisms, associated with different movements, theories, people, nations, and notions. Thus we do not have a single feminism but rather multidisciplinary feminisms, such as First Wave feminism, Second Wave feminism, Third Wave feminism, French feminism, American feminism, British feminism, Black feminism, White Feminism, Socialist feminism, Marxist feminism, Separatist feminism, Liberal feminism, Radical feminism, Cultural feminism, Reformist feminism, Eco-feminism, Anarcha-feminism, Chicana feminism, Multiracial feminism, Post-colonial feminism, Post-feminism, Postmodern feminism, Post-structuralist feminism, Third World feminism, New Age feminism, Womanist feminism, Cyberfeminism, Liberal cyberfeminism, Radical cyberfeminism, Cyborg feminism, Transfeminism, et cetera. During 1980s some feminists adopted the theory of postmodernism: its sceptical attitude towards grand narratives and „Truth‟ - its notion of „fluidity‟ and „play‟ and its celebration of 11 fragmentation within advanced electronic communication space. This has been called postmodern feminism. Postmodern feminism in the first place rejected the dualistic view of gender, heteronormativity and biological determinism of Western philosophy. To destabilize the politically charged and structured gender discrimination, postmodern feminism has rejected these binary oppositions whereby one is privileged over the other. Feminism has also employed deconstruction to annihilate the binary opposition of masculine/feminine dualism. Feminists like Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Donna Haraway have proposed some innovative and provocative ways of re-thinking gendered and sexual subjectivity. These feminists introduced different ideas to define gender. Judith Butler has pointed out that gender is a discursive construction and performance rather than a biological fact. Her works are marked by a “linguistic turn,” a term which was popularised by Richard Rorty‟s seminal anthology The Linguistic Turn (1967), which later proved useful to Anglo-American feminist theory in its turn towards linguistic philosophy. Moreover, she significantly exemplifies the postmodern fluidity of gender, and shows how through medical- surgical transformations, the gender can be changed—thus pointing out the fluid and unfixed nature of gender. According to Butler, all gender and sexual identities are performative, while Sedgwick offers us a range of new modes of classifying gender and sexuality.

Donna Haraway relies on postmodern technological developments and describes the contemporary subject as a cyborg who is not locked into organic gender identification (Phoca 46). So, according to postmodern feminists, the cyberspace and advanced technologies shall diminish the gender discrimination. In her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto”, which stands as a classic in feminist theory, Haraway illustrates the collision between the postmodern digital information and feminism. Critiquing Marxism for its western notion of labour theory and value and its inability to analyze the subject in terms of cultural differences, she employs the theory of postmodernism in order to analyze how notions of race, gender, and class have been distorted by technological developments (Phoca 52). The contemporary subject, according to her, is a cyborg, a postmodern metaphor. It is the configuration of the subject which has been disassembled and reassembled. It is the „illegitimate child of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism‟ (qtd. in Phoca 52). Haraway‟s concept of Cyborg thus dismantles the traditional notions of the organic subject. 12

Therefore, one can say that feminism, in its varied ways forms, has been engaged in emancipating woman from conventional patriarchal shackles which have kept her within the four walls, deprived her of basic rights, constructed her into a gendered „other‟, objectified her to define his „self‟, and presented her as a source of destruction and degeneration.

3. Feminism and Literature

Feminism as a literary theory has had an enormous impact on art, literature and academic literary studies as it has been continuously and significantly growing into different fields of social, political, economic, literary, and other forms of art. As far as literature is concerned, it is a way of „seeing‟, as any other theory does, and to use Lisa Maria Hogeland‟s words, “a way of reading both texts and everyday life from a particular stance” (qtd. in Lebihan 103). Primarily, it began to scrutinize canonical literature produced by male writers to highlight the ideological and political female representation, that would often depict her as „ideal woman‟, „Angel in the House‟, „submissive wife‟, „destructive witch‟, „the nagging wife‟, „source of evil‟, „first transgressor‟, „the inconstant lover‟, „the shrewish spinster‟, „the disdainful mistress or the seducing whore‟ „the other‟ and so on. The woman, therefore, has been always mystified by man as a bizarre object. Her different roles in the literature written by men are presented as dark and negative which help Man to present himself as powerful and strong—the Master. Beauvoir has very beautifully pointed out the different roles in which women have been cast throughout the history. She writes:

Delilah and Judith, Aspasia and Lucretia, Pandora and Athena, woman is both Eve and the Virgin Mary. She is an idol, a servant, source of life, power darkness; she is the elementary silence of truth, she is artifice, gossip and lies; she is the medicine woman and witch; she is prey; she is his downfall, she is everything he is not and wants to have, his negation and his raison d‟etre. (166)

Works of literature written by men have always been the same in their representation of female characters by producing masculine superhero figures such as Perseus, Hercules, David, Achilles, Lancelot, de Guesclin, Bayard, Napoleon, who propound male superiority myths. In contrast, as de Beauvoir observes, women have been presented as “pale figures next to those of the great men; and most are immersed in shadows of some male hero” (313). The woman, waiting for her lover, to be loved, 13 has to wait. “Woman is Sleeping Beauty, Donkey Skin, Cinderella, Snow White, the one who receives and endures” (Beauvoir 316). Whereas, Man seeks her, fights dragons, combats giants. She, a submissive figure, waiting for that day—“One day my prince will come…Someday he‟ll come along, the man I love…” (Beauvoir 316). Simone de Beauvoir further states, “One symbolizes virility and the other femininity: it is because femininity means alterity and inferiority that its revelation is met with shame” (340).

The status of woman is fixed in time. She has become something through which Man could challenge anything. She is objectified not only in literature but also in sculpture, painting and various other art forms. In this regard, de Beauvoir quotes Poulain de la Barre, a little known seventeenth-century feminist, that: “everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion because they are both judge and party” (10-11). The feminist analysis of these works and deconstruction of these female stereotypes has resulted in numerous feminist writings and have become a part of the political process of female emancipation. Because, as Cora Kaplan argues in Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (1986), that “defiance is a component of the act of writing for women” (qtd. in Lebihan 103).

Before the outburst of literary theory in general and feminism in particular (around 1960s), there were very few active feminist writers. Literature was dominated by men who portrayed female sexuality and femininity according to their male desire and fantasy and stereotyped them as an inferior other. This tendency received the critical attention of feminists. As observed by de Beauvoir, “to be feminine is to show oneself as weak, futile, passive and docile” (359). Similarly, according to Jill Lebihan, “By representing women as sexual objects, for instance, rather than politically powerful subjects, women receive a version of femininity and womanhood that is perpetually limited and therefore limiting” (103). Therefore, the relation between feminism and literature is to „see‟ and highlight these stereotypes of women in literature, and produce a counter discourse to dismantle these stereotypes and binaries that have been constructed throughout the history written by men. However, literature also could become a tool to highlight and resist the oppression of women in patriarchal society

Throughout history, woman has been defined by negative „not‟ and „lack‟. Even Aristotle once said, “The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of 14 qualities,” (qtd. in Beauvoir 5) and “Incomplete Man” was St. Thomas‟ term for her. Thus, she has been time and again defined in comparison to man and in this man- woman dichotomy all the negative stereotypes have been associated with her—the man, portrayed as „strong,‟ and opposed to the woman, the „damsel in distress,‟ „persecuted maiden,‟ „princess in jeopardy‟. Beauvoir further quoted Michelet‟s words, “woman the relative being,” (6) to show how she is not considered as an autonomous being; rather has always been defined in relation to man. Man always sees her as hollow, devoid of meaning who has no existence without him, while he himself claims of being „complete‟. Moreover, Helene Cixous also points out that, “Either the woman is passive or she doesn‟t exist. What is left is unthinkable, unthought of” (qtd. in Robbins 171). Cixous was against deadly binaries in which one is always privileged, active, and present and the other is unprivileged, passive, and nonexistent. The former destroys the latter into „meaninglessness and absence‟. Among the master binary of man/woman, around which every other binary is revolving around, the woman is always conceived negatively. This assertion and tag of negativity to the female is the creation of patriarchy which is always essentialist and biologist.

When the works of the greatest of medieval and classical writers like Chaucer and Shakespeare are read from a feminist perspective, the female characters, for example, Proserpina in the Merchant’s Tale and the Wife of Bath in Canterbury Tales, have been found revolting against the oppressive authority of man. Hence, it is evident that women have been always in oppression and their voice against it has been dumped in their hearts.

With the beginning of feminist writing, firstly, the voice against the negative portrayal of female gained strength. Secondly, feminists themselves began to express their selves and bodies in their own literary and other forms of art. One of the famous critical books The Women’s Sharp Revenge by Tattle-well and Hit-him-home is a strong answer to male misogyny. Similarly, Mary Wroth in her Pamphilia to Amphilanthus gave voice and subjectivity to women who had been considered as voiceless. Jane Anger‟s voice resonated very high, and Mary Wollstonecraft further dealt with the question of identity, imagination and gendered sexuality which had been constructed particularly during the emergence of French Revolution. In her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she critiques the textual femininity and strongly 15 attacks the false sensibility labelled particularly by Edmund Burke‟s works Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Reflections on the Revolution in France. In his works, Burke has divided sublimity and beauty; while the former has been associated with masculinity, power, and experience of pain by him, the latter, he related with weakness, femininity and the experience of pleasure. According to him, “Those virtues which cause admiration and are of the sublime kind, produce terror rather than love” (Burke 100). In his view, beauty would be the quality of the body which causes one to fall in love. He further says:

This quality, where it is highest in the female sex, always carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection. Women are very sensible of this; for which reason, they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness, and even sickness. In all this, they are guided by nature . . . The sublime . . . always dwells on great objects, and terrible; the [beautiful] on small ones, and pleasing; we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, on the other, we are flattered into compliance. (103)

However, Wollstonecraft strongly resisted the stereotypical „feminine‟ Eve- figure and criticised this sexualized gendered identity, the first literary example of which would be the propagation of artificial femininity presented by Milton‟s Eve. In the second chapter of The Vindication, she criticised Milton‟s female characterization as being “formed for softness and sweet attractive grace” and made “to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation” (87). She for the first time openly challenged the male-centred philosophical notions of universality, purity, rationality and self. Her critique also includes Rousseau‟s strong belief in reason and the power of man. To him women have the only power of cunning, achieved by exploiting tears and caresses; however, Wollstonecraft redefined his dictum of „educate women like men‟. After Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth‟s Letter for Literary Ladies and Practical Education did not only openly confirm Wollstonecraft‟s influence but she praised her anti-Rousseauvian stance and her struggle for women. Edgeworth has called for women participation and urged parents and protectors to let their women free: “Shake off the trifling, glittering shackles, which debase you … Let your daughters be liberally, classically, 16 philosophically, and usefully educated; let them speak and write their opinions freely…[teach]them to feel their mental equality with their imperious rulers” (83). Moreover, George Eliot in her essay “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft”, while admiring Wollstonecraft for her incomparable work for gender equality and woman emancipation, rewrites Wollstonecraft: “we want freedom and culture for woman, because subjection and ignorance have debased her, and with her Man; for - „If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,/How shall men grow?‟” (205).

“On the eve of the twentieth century, the image of the New Woman was widespread in Europe from Vienna to London, from Munich and Heidelberg to Brussels and Paris” (qtd. in Showalter 38), the French historian Michelle Parrot stated. New Woman, described by Showalter as an „anarchic figure‟ (38) and „woman warrior‟ by a critic for Quarterly Review (1871), was a threat to masculinity in fin de siècle, a period of sexual anarchy. The New Woman belonged to a class of university educated, intellectual and independent women who emerged in the second half of the nineteenth-century, and against whom there was upheaval in every branch of knowledge and academics. Men of literature such as Georges, Donen, Emile Zola, Albert Cim, Maurice Barres and many more of the period wrote against this new emerging moment of female progressiveness. Every issue of Punch, The Yellow Book, and The Revolt of Man by Walter Besant, novelist, journalist, founder of the Society of Authors and a staunch anti-feminist, brought forth their worries about it. In this context, referring to anti-feminists like Walter Besant, Showalter says, “His first anxieties are Oedipal: he fears that in reversal of the Victorian marriage market, young men will be forced to marry women old enough to be their mothers… „tooth- less hoary old women‟” (42). Other doctors, politician, journalists and medical scientists waged war against its alarming spread in France, particularly from 1889 to 1900. Victor Joze in the journal La Plume argued, “Feminists are wrong when they turn women away from the duties of their sex, and when they turn their heads with illusory emancipator ideas, which are unrealizable and absurd. Let woman remain what Nature has made her: an ideal woman, the companion and love of a man, the mistress of the home” (qtd. in Showalter, SA 40). Winter‟s popular medical text, The Borderlands of Insanity (1877) gave a detailed description of men thrown in “Mazeland,” “Dazeland” and “Driftland,” as a consequence of New Woman. Establishment of separate “Clublands” further attempted to drift away and strengthen 17 the borderlines between the sexes, which had been rendered fragile by the New Woman. Seeing these women involved in intellectual and educational pursuits, scientists such as Geddes and Thomson warned them of premature death. Other doctors and psychologists of the period linked the New Woman with fatal diseases, which according to them, would result in “nervous disorders including anorexia, neurasthenia, and hysteria” (Showalter 40).

However, these battles against the movement of the New Woman did not hurl down its high spirits. It paved the way for the first wave of feminism and continued to dismantle the idealized and politicized image created throughout the history of literature and other arts that was dominated by men. Moreover, it also influenced many male writers of the period who are sometimes referred as New Man.

Maupassant was well aware of a movement called “New Woman,” a term coined by Sarah Grand in her article “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” and popularized by Henry James, a British-American writer. As a movement for female equality, empowerment, and emancipation, New Woman literature is sometimes referred to as one of the „strands‟ of the first-wave feminism. It was an attempt to decentralize the objectification of woman in literature and to pave way for female individuality and subjectivity. Besides British and other European women, there were some American and French writers who produced consciously pro-feminist literature. As their concern with sex and sexual complexity became the prevalent characteristic, their literature is alike in their exploration of the condition feminine. However, in Maupassant‟s case, as noted by Ana Rosso in her thesis “Female Sexuality in French Naturalism and Realism, and British New Woman Fiction, 1850-1900”, it would be problematic to count him “Proto-feminist”, yet there is much common in his works and the works of feminist writers (28).

Maupassant‟s stories immediately remind us of the late nineteenth century, famously known as the fin de siècle, a period of the masculinity crises, the theme that most of the literature produced during the age dealt with. Further, Elaine Showalter has described the period as a period of „sexual anarchy‟, a phrase she borrowed from George Gissing (Showalter 3). Therefore, some social changes, for example, the emergence of the New Woman which threatened the gender definitions, also find a place in Maupassant‟s various short stories. As it was the high point that separated the spheres of men and women ideologically and created the world on “the belief that 18 men were active, economically independent, competitive, striving creatures whilst women were passive, dependent, nurturing and weak” (Robbins 221); therefore, the masculinity crisis of the period was the result of the shift of gender relations and disorder of binary oppositions. “If femininity was not what it was supposed to be, then masculinity was troubled as well” (Robbins 222). Maupassant‟s stories too foreground the crises of the period and explore the masculinity myth which at times became the central issue of his work. For example, the concept of „man‟s man‟, a critical „macho‟ figure of period is presented in his „Le Lit 29‟ (Bed No 29); the moustache, a symbol of traditional masculinity in “La Moustache” (The Mustache) and “Un Duel” (A Duel); other masculine ventures and expeditions in his “Deux Amis” (Two Friends), “En Mer” (At Sea) and many others.

4. Maupassant and Manto in Feminist Perspective

John Ruskin in his Modern Painter points out that “the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way” (qtd. in Robbins 1). Similarly, Maupassant and Manto‟s literary journey starts with „seeing‟ the world around them. This study is about „looking‟ for what they „saw‟ and then, how they represented it, whether “in a plain way” or ideologically manipulated. Insofar as their own claim is concerned, they were convinced that they presented honestly what they saw. They did not try to define things, rather they only represented them as definition always limits meaning and involves subjectivity.

Ruth Robbins in her Literary Feminism has very clearly explained the ideological and powerful process of definition as it puts limitations on the meanings or reality of the things. As far as man and woman and their definitions are concerned, she highlights the basic social structure in which man and woman are treated differently, one against the other. “Man needs no definition; he is the norm against which Woman is defined as an aberration, pathological condition, associated with „complaints‟ and „weeping‟ and „pains‟” (Robbins 2). It is further explained that how man has been separated from the „body‟ and the pains associated with it. It is the woman who has been actually defined and considered as a body as if she is the only one who has got it, including all the pains associated with it. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex talks about this asymmetrical social construction of the two thus:

Woman is defined exclusively in her relation to man. The asymmetry of the categories—male and female—is made manifest in the unilateral 19

form of sexual myths. We sometimes say „the sex‟ to designate woman; she is the flesh, its delights and dangers. The truth that for woman man is sex and carnality has never been proclaimed because there is no one to proclaim it. Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. (qtd. in Robbins 2)

It is this representation of women by the two writers in this study that this thesis focuses on because, I argue, that both the (male) authors have mostly written on the subjects revolving around female, body, sex and sexuality. The representation of the self-declared „norm‟ of male shall be weighed against the socially, culturally and conventionally constructed „otherness‟ of female, in an attempt to bring out the asymmetrical relation in the world, both inside and outside the text. Throughout history, the repeated misrepresentation and social construction of female has been turned into „reality‟ and thus has been confused with „truth‟. Feminism has been striving against this totalizing confused truth. It has worked against the sexualization of femininity, a more dangerous process which “keeps women actually weak, while pretending to offer them (very limited) power” (Robbins 27).

Both Maupassant and Manto, as has already been mentioned, talk about the female body Though they are often a contrast to each other in their representations; however, through their stories it is made clear that how the female body, a biological category, becomes sociological category when it is associated with different contexts, politically and ideologically charged and centred by Man. The present study intends to how the body has been given social and cultural meanings in relation with so many other things, which are considered as the socially acceptable behaviour, and, therefore, it is questioned again and again.

In her seminal book Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change, Rita Felski points out that literature is that mode of expression which makes us think about which has not even happened yet, and which we cannot imagine without it. Further, she says, “Literature does not merely constitute a self-referential and metalinguistic system…but is also a medium which can profoundly influence individual and personal understanding in the sphere of everyday life, charting the changing preoccupation of social groups through symbolic fictions by means of which they make sense of experience” (7). Literature, as Manto explains in his essay 20

“Kasauti” (Touchstone) is “an ornament, and just as pretty jewellery is not always unalloyed gold, neither is a beautiful piece of writing pure reality. To rub it over and over again on the touchstone like a nugget of gold is the height of tastelessness… (It) is either literature or it is the worst kind of offence…an outrageous monstrosity” (qtd. in Memon xvi). Both Maupassant and Manto have presented those realities that histories failed to. If the literature is not „seen‟ („looking for,‟ as any theory attempts to) from feminist theory, the hidden credentials and values of it may lie buried forever under the cloth of the language apparently apolitical. In this regard, Ruth Robbins says,

The adjective feminist, with its implication of political action and political viewpoint is an attack on both the supposedly inherent apolitical value of literature and on the objectivity of theory. Feminist theory is „doing‟ as well as a way of seeing—practice impinges on the purity of theory. Literature is also modified by theory alone, since the will to theorise a thing implies that its value is not self-evident” (12).

Therefore, the present study entitled “A Feminist Reading of Select Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant and Sadat Hasan Manto” is an attempt to unveil what is hidden, point out what has been ignored or not seen as yet. Feminist theory would help to uncover varied representations of women in the writings of the two writers and focus extensively on their representations of sex and sexuality. It deconstructs the constructed female identity, politicizes what has been claimed as personal because personal is political. Feminism as a pluralist theory has been very useful to this study. With its help, the study will analyze the oppression, repression, and expression of female bodies on various planes and situations. This thesis highlights the idea that patriarchy has been indulging in the psychological oppression of the female body by virtue of relating it to childbearing, supposedly the only „women‟s work,‟ (Robbins 15) which renders her weak and hence, susceptible to violence and rape. It also maintains that the cultural oppression of woman has rendered her as the „other‟ and debarred her from the basic rights.

All these forms of oppression of female characters can be seen in most of the short stories of Maupassant and Manto. Both the authors have strongly expressed their indignation against the injustice to the woman, especially those belonging to the downtrodden classes such as prostitutes. However, they sometimes tend to be 21 involved in or ignore the oppression of patriarchy and social injustice; the study, therefore, adopts a critical attitude to highlight how literature as an expression and influence can be politically and ideologically charged. Hence the analysis of their stories is actually the analysis of their experiences and observations of the world because literature can never escape a particular social, cultural and economic influence in which it has been produced.

Maupassant and Manto strive to reinstate the female status in society, especially of those belonging to the lower class. They have argued that there is no valid reason for women to be considered inferior to men. Particularly Manto, in his short stories, has given his female protagonists a subjective position, a voice to assert themselves, and a power to rebel against oppression. He questions the inferior status to which women are relegated in a patriarchal society, and, like other writers who are concerned with social issues, argues, in Robbins words, that, “Man is taken as the norm and the ideal, and Woman is his defining „other‟, the being who validates his importance because of her differences from him” (57). Further, in this regard, Simone de Beauvoir explains thus:

Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. …she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called „the sex‟, by which is meant that she appears to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex—absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to this essential. He is the Subject, the Absolute—she is the Other. (qtd. in Robbins 58)

Maupassant‟s attitude towards womankind and his handling of sexual relations in his stories have been discussed by Robert Crewe in his critical introduction to Pierre & Jean. He has referred to some of his stories in which the subject sinks into crudeness. However, the grossness of subject matter happens to be the only reason that stories like “Boule de Suif,” “La Maison Tellier,” “L‟ Heritage” etc., came into existence. This is his artistic, if not ethical, justification for their existence. “To Maupassant the existence of sex was almost the prime and paramount fact in the world…,” observes Crewe. “It beset his mind with a perpetual appeal, and therefore inevitably strikes the dominant note in his books” (Crewe xxiv). Similarly, Manto too 22 has considered the existence of sex as primordial in the world, and like hunger, it is primal and its suppression can lead to an anomalous life. In this regard, one is certainly reminded of his statement in his short story “Paanch Din” (Five Days) that “to kill a legitimate desire is tantamount to a heinous murder. To kill one‟s nature is to do violence to oneself” (qtd. in Asaduddin, BM 23).

Both Maupassant and Manto are known for their innovative and unconventional subject and style and, hence, are called Modern writers who went very deep to explore realistic and existential issues related to the woman in political, economic, social, cultural and psychological spheres of life. Both the writers wear new and unconventional lenses to focus on the theme of female sexuality, which has been always defined by male desire in literature and other arts. Their representation of female characters sometimes contrasts; for example, Maupassant has represented the female and her sexuality from an aesthetic point of view, without much focus on her existence, identity, and subjectivity. Whereas, Manto has been more determined in presenting the oppression of the female in society and her resistance against it—a journey full of struggle to achieve female individuality and subjectivity.

The study basically focuses on the representation of the female characters in general and prostitutes in particular in the select short stories. In this context, it has been argued that prostitution can be seen from two different perspectives - first, prostitution as a creation of patriarchy and an institution of oppression, and second, as a medium to assert female sexuality. Therefore, the representation of prostitutes in prostitution takes a more complex stance in the writings of both the writers. On the one hand, it shows how women have been commoditized by male desire or gaze, while on the other hand, it also shows how she can transcend the idealized figure of „Angel in the House‟. Her economic freedom here acts as a backlash against the convention role of a domestic obedient wife who is supposed to be passive and restricted to one life partner only. She is strong enough to avenge her oppression. Alongside Maupassant, there were many other feminist writers in the late 19th century in France, who wrote about prostitution. For example, George Sand, Maria Deraisemes and Rachilde (Marguerite Vallette-Eymery) were extensively involved in the defence of prostitutes‟ rights. Goldberg Moses writes that these feminist writers were highly concerned with subjects like sexuality, morality, the sexual double standard, marriage and motherhood etc. and how they “wrote about sexual passion 23 and fulfilment as a goal for women” (183). Thus in the fin de siècle, there was a wave of writers including Maupassant who wrote on such issues and concerns of women; however, Maupassant‟s stories were exceptional because of his being a male writer.

Manto too wrote penetratingly on prostitution, though it had been the subject of literature and more specifically of Urdu literature from centuries. His unique approach to the subject is that he bestowed the prostitute with a voice to assert her identity, a female gaze to counter the male one, and a rebellious nature against oppression. For example, Manto‟s short story “Khushiya” is very important in this context in that it describes the state of masculinity crises similar to Maupassant‟s stories which have described on the rise of the New Woman. Kanta, a female prostitute in the story, can be compared with the New Woman figure. Her counter gaze is so powerful that it destructs the male gaze of the eponymous male character, Khushiya, a pimp by profession. Khushiya intends to see his prostitute client, Kanta and before reaching her room, on the way, he imagines Kanta on her bed lying with her hair all set. His imaginary gaze objectifies the body of Kanta and derives pleasure from it. However, everything is shattered when Kanta opens the door and comes before him semi-nude. Khushiya tells her that she should not have come out naked. But Kanta replies, “what is the harm…It‟s only Khushiya…” (Manto 60) with a smile that terrified him. Her words „only Khushiya‟ rendered him apart, shook his whole masculine identity, and returned his male gaze back to him. His male gaze was meant to render her into nothingness and nonexistent. But her counter gaze proved much more powerful and peeled off his adopted cultural attitude and socially bestowed active self.

To Khushiya, it was not Kanta‟s nude body that shattered him, but her smile that was much more shattering. It acted like Medusa‟s laugh and turned him into a stone in terror. As pointed out by Cixous in her influential essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” that the anarchic activities of sex, laughter and writing can undo the edifices of patriarchy (Robbins 175). Kanta‟s smile/laugh and her body slapped Khushiya‟s male desire and his patriarchal gaze. Her smile seems unusual and unnatural to Khushiya because she was not expected to smile at that moment of encounter. In this context, Kanta‟s smile reminds of Simone de Beauvoir‟s observation that “she has been taught to overestimate her smile, but no one told her 24 that all women smiled” (670). Further, Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema talks about the power of gaze and to-be-looked-at-ness thus:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is that leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire. (837)

Therefore, the present study acts as a kind of feminist critique of Maupassant and Manto‟s short stories in the context of the female representation in the male- produced literature. In doing so Feminist theoretical perspectives have been kept in mind; particularly, the arguments of Simone de Beauvoir‟s The Second Sex function as background support to the critical analysis of the selected short stories while positioning both the writers within contemporary and modern debates on female sexuality and female representation. Since the selected stories present the late 19th century and the first half of 20th century, thus the fundamental concepts of the feminist literary theory have been taken in to consideration while critically analyzing the selected writings of Maupassant and Manto.

5. The Objective and Questions

The revisiting of classical works of literature like that of Maupassant and Manto from a feminist perspective would be an important step for developing a new critical tradition. Although both the authors have been extensively read and written upon, the study finds a wide gap which it, therefore, attempts to fill in. The study applies a new approach to both the writers, as no feminist study of their short stories has been attempted yet, except some passing references and a few articles on their female characterization. The comparative studies that have been done on both Maupassant and Manto have not ventured to explore the stories from a feminist perspective, and they have been limited only to their life, art, and style. Therefore, all the socio-political nuances of their respective contexts have been kept in view in this 25 study while evaluating their short stories. An attempt has been made to bridge the gap between the two apparently different literatures, languages, and cultures. Further, this study provides a space to have a fruitful dialogue between the two authors whereby their similarities and contrasts have been minutely observed and related to the theme of the study. In other words, this study opens the field of comparison and dialogue beyond the authors and their respective literary and cultural contexts.

Manto is considered as one of the four pillars of the Urdu short story. He, together with Krishan Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi and Ismat Chugtai, has not only developed the genre in Urdu but has made it powerful enough to compete with the whole short story genre of the world literature. Among them, Manto has been given an epithet of the master of short story, “the undisputed master of the Indian short story” in Salman Rushdie‟s words (qtd. in Memon, Back cover). As a born short story writer, he claimed that it was not he who wrote these stories, rather stories would write him.

Manto‟s stories cover many aspects of life and present the different shades of female sexuality; however, his favourite aspect was the depiction of the life of a prostitute. He explored female sexuality, which was rarely talked about in Urdu literature before him, and he highlighted particularly the exploitation and oppression of prostitutes in prostitution, which he found an oppressive institution regulated by patriarchy. He exposed the patriarchal society and broke every barricade in his way to expose its deepest social structures. Consequently, his stories were banned as the unbearable stories. But his answer to the „guards of morality‟ was that “If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty. In my stories, I have only exposed the truth” (qtd. in Tamiri 33). Therefore, his pursuit to „write on a blackboard‟ with a „black chalk‟ in order to highlight „blackness of society‟ had him sued six times before the court of law and, to use Ayesha Jalal‟s words, he was tried for “brutally honest depictions” of life (Preface, TPP x).

It is believed that Maupassant and Manto have painted female characters through the male gaze, either consciously or unconsciously. But, was their representation free of prejudice and bias? Did they also perceive woman as a tool of pleasure? Whether or not have they played the role of male, patriarchal and biased agent of any powerful and dominant institutions of society? One has to answer these questions before gearing up for a feminist study of Maupassant and Manto‟s short 26 stories. As both the authors have struggled in their attempt to represent women in their writings after observing them performing different roles in society, the present study, therefore, attempts to address these questions. There are loads of references in their short stories, essays, and letters wherein they talk about women, their rights and status in the society - how they are and have been oppressed by Man in his socially constructed powerful roles such as father, husband, lover, son etc. In fact, their best short stories are those which deal with the issues of woman, her sexuality, identity, oppression and rebellion. However, some of these questions have been always addressed ambiguously by their critics. For example, questions such as, was Manto a feminist? Is Maupassant‟s attitude sympathetic or misogynist, particularly in his stories as far as the representation of female characters is concerned, have been addressed by different writers.

The question whether Manto was a feminist has been raised by many Manto critics. Some have acknowledged him as a feminist, while others have refuted this claim. Prof. Quddus Jawaid in his article “Manto ka Fun” (Art of Manto) observes the feminist characteristics in Manto‟s writings. He says that Manto‟s entire oeuvre strives to highlight the oppression and inequality of women, especially of those who belong to lower classes, who are often forced to adopt a profession like prostitution because of their economic and other conditions, and it clearly proves him as a feminist writer. Manto shows his human concerns, progressive consciousness and sympathetic attitude by representing the social, psychological and economic problems of women (Jawaid 85). Prof. Quddus Javaid further points out that Manto‟s in-depth psychic representation of prostitute characters proves him a short story writer of “Ahtiram-e Aurat‖ (respect for a woman) (86). Shamsur Rehman Farooqi has also pointed out in his book ―Hamarey Liye Manto Sahab‖ that Manto‟s essay “Gunnah ki Betiyan” (Daughters of Sin) reminds us of feminism. Farooqi muses that a prostitute is generally defined as someone who sells her ismat (virtue) for money, but Manto would wonder how one could sell her ismat again and again (13). Farooqi has raised an important question against the biased society which makes laws pertaining to women only. Why have only women been measured and judged by the laws passed by men, wonders Farooqi? If in prostitution both men and women are involved, one wonders, why is it that only women are blamed for it (14). 27

Conversely, Waris Alvi argues that Manto was not a feminist because if he would have been one then he would not have created characters like Rukma, Halakat Khan, and Lateeka Rani. However, on the other hand, his other characters such as Sogandhi, Sultana, Sakeena, Mammy, Sharda etc. are the testimony of his being a feminist. Most of Manto‟s critics treat him as a realist and progressive voice; however, few of them have accused him as a reactionary, a pornographer, a sensualist and as having a diseased mind. Apart from that, regarding the question of his association with feminism, some critics totally negate him as a feminist, and others consider him a feminist; whereas, some have given ambiguous responses to the question. One of the reasons of ambiguity might be that Manto himself has not taken any stand. Manto passed way some years before the outburst of feminism as a well- defined revolutionary movement in 1960‟s. Even if it is argued that Manto was not a feminist writer, yet his place among those writers who wrote for the rights and emancipation of women would figure at the top; because, his writings clearly demonstrate his serious concern for woman, especially the downtrodden prostitutes. His stories sympathetically narrate the oppression of woman associated with prostitution. The aspects of women that we find in Manto‟s writings are unique and different. Other writers who also wrote on similar subjects could not reach the sublimity of Manto‟s stories, and if there is anyone next to him in this regard, it is only Ismat Chugtai. However, on the basis of Manto‟s ideas about women‟s rights and equality which are found in his writings, one can still prove him to be a feminist writer per se.

On the other hand, Maupassant, though born in a country where the feminist movement was strongly rooted, has been studied very little from a feminist perspective. Critics have called him a misogynist, who has written extensively on masculinity crises as the period was immersed in the conflict of sexuality. Like him, most of the writers and other social scientists were engaged in redefining the meanings of femininity and masculinity; however, Maupassant, in his stories, has dealt with both. Consequently, it becomes more ambiguous especially when the writer has been already noted as misogynist, but a thorough analysis of his writings reveals that he too has talked about the condition of lower class woman and her oppression and has raised his voice in support of her. Thus his stories have created a world much like the fin de siècle period, in which the boundaries separating men and women 28 became very intricate. On the one hand, as a „misogynist‟ writer he has presented „useless woman‟ under the influence of Schopenhauer‟s theories. On the other hand, he also has presented her as a sympathetic figure, a saviour of the nation, a victim of patriarchy, a rebel like the New Woman. His „African‟ stories are based on the experiences he had during his travels to Algeria and North Africa. These stories present some interesting perspectives on „foreigners,‟ a term that can be related to the „other‟ in the post-colonial perspective, especially women who are objectified as exotically beautiful in these stories. These women, belonging to a „primitive continent‟, are portrayed as strange, mysterious, nomadic, animalistic, and of different „race‟, totally the „other‟. These stories include his famous stories such as “Allouma” and “Marroca”.

Thus Maupassant‟s representation of female characters swings between two poles: in some stories, the representation is colonial and misogynistic, while in others the female character is presented as an active, subjective and unconventional rebel for some positive change. Binaries such as „oppressor and oppressed,‟ „powerful and weak,‟ „center and marginal,‟ „self and other‟, and most of all „man and woman‟ are present in his stories, and therefore, the present feminist study strives to unveil the power structures to bring into limelight how both masculinity and femininity are socially constructed, whereby one is always privileged over the other so much that the other is rendered „nonexistent‟ and „meaningless‟. Gender and class divisions are considered as „ahistorical‟ master categories, but as Mary Poovey in Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1989) suggests that they are not universal or trans-historical. They are bound in time and space and are influenced by the power relations in a society. Therefore, both femininity and masculinity are the results of ideological formation and social construction, unlike male and female which is a biological division.

Speaking from a comparative perspective, Manto has also presented different shades of a woman - sometimes she is intrinsically weak and too susceptible to sin, and at times she becomes an embodiment of innocence and kindness. She becomes a prey to the man-dominated society but cannot raise her voice against the tyranny. However, at other times she rebels against the age-old injustice and oppression. The prostitute and the mother are the two main aspects of a female in Manto‟s stories. But before all these division she is first the daughter of nature and in the words of Mumtaz 29

Shireen, “Manto ne apni Hawa ko fitrat ki gaud main pohnchaya ha” (Manto has returned his Hawa [one of his female characters, but here it is a pun on word “Hawa”, which also means Eve, the first woman] to the lap of nature.) Though she has traded her body in cities, her inner woman does not die. She is very much alive and her self- deception sometimes makes her forget her natural gift (the real woman living inside her), but she then discovers it soon enough. She avenges her oppressor and rebels against the patriarchal system.

The real achievement of an artist is the immortality of his characters, which gives him permanent place in the history of literature. The characters of Manto, pictured in real complexities of life, create a true picture of a writer. It is his artistic sublimity he explores and understands the deep recesses of the soul and inner world of a deeply hurt woman. He is the artist who focuses on their inner pain and agony, rather than portraying only their illusion of reality. For example in his story „Hatak‟ (Insult), Manto points out that the inner self of a prostitute cannot be sold or bought. Her inner self is craving for respect and love and is fed up with the mechanical exchange of money for flesh. Manto‟s other short stories also such as “Darpok,” (Coward) “Baanj,” (Barren) “Khushiya,” “Thanda Gosht,” (Cold Meat) “Dhu‟an,” (Smoke) “Blouse,” etc., explore the layers of the human psyche, and Manto has successfully portrayed its inner conflicts.

Therefore, the representation of female sexuality in the short stories of both Maupassant and Manto tends to be multi-faceted because of their enormous output and vast thematic reach. Though the female representation varies but, on the whole, the study intends to show that they have given an equal voice to their female characters and tried to highlight the patriarchal social structures, under the umbrella of which women have been victimized, oppressed and exploited in different social, political, economic etc. spheres of life. Moreover, there are certainly a lot of differences in their writings and approach towards the woman question. Therefore, their representation of women contrasts with each other, which the study attempts to point out in all the chapters of the thesis.

6. Chapter Division

The title of the thesis itself points out to the three major aspects of the study— firstly, the biographical and artistic life of both the authors; secondly, a feminist reading of their short stories; and finally, an over-all thematically comparative 30 feminist study of various issues related to the female representation in their stories. The thesis is divided into seven chapters including the introduction and conclusion, covering all the three aspects. Following is a brief outline of the chapters:

Chapter I, the introductory chapter frames out the overall background of the study, with a detailed introduction to feminism, its historical outline and its relation to literature. The chapter starts with a brief review of the present comparative studies of Maupassant and Manto and of those already done on each writer. It further discusses the method of application of the feminist theory to the select short stories, along with the rationale, objectives, and questions to be answered throughout the thesis.

Chapter II of the thesis starts by structuring the contextual background of the study, whereby, particularly, the development of short story criticism is critically reviewed, emphasizing on the late nineteenth century as a period of significance. Though the period has produced the greatest works of short story genre, it has not been much focused on by critics. Therefore, more efforts are required to bridge the gap with modern perspectives. The chapter further discusses how the new critical insights about the criticism of the genre developed during the last decades of the twentieth century. In this regard, most of the important works have been discussed very briefly. Next, this chapter, very briefly, attempts to draw a connection between Maupassant‟s personal life and his artistic career. His literary relationship with Gustav Flaubert has been compared with Manto‟s literary relationship with his guide and mentor, Bari Alig. Maupassant‟s complex and multidimensional life has a greater part and influence in his writings. Therefore, indelible scars of his childhood, his parents‟ unhappy and unfruitful relationship, and his pessimistic outlook as shaped by many European philosophers, particularly Schopenhauer, are briefly related to his overall personality as a writer.

The second part of this chapter deals with his art of fiction writing - his own ideas about art, objectivity, realism, and his choice of subject. Particularly, it discusses the critical attacks on his stories for his choice of subject and characters, related to low life and sexuality. The multiplicity of his subjects is his real achievement as mentioned by his biographer and critic Steegmuller. Therefore, this chapter is the total sum of his life, works, and art.

The chapter III of the thesis is set as parallel to the chapter I. It starts with an introduction to the Urdu short story, the dominant genre of the first half of the 31 twentieth century. Further, it discusses how it has developed from one of the oldest forms of narration called Dastan and became the most experimental genre later on in the century. Among the four pillars of the Urdu short story are Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Ismat Chugtai, and Manto, also known as progressive writers for their contribution in bringing literature closer to reality. Manto happened to be the most innovative, experimental and radical. Next, Manto‟s life is discussed very briefly which is essential in understanding his works. His literary relationship with Bari Alig has been discussed in comparison with the relationship between Maupassant and Flaubert. Manto has himself acknowledged the fact that it was Bari Alig who turned Sadat Hasan into Manto. Lastly, the chapter discusses Manto‟s ideas and style of writing, his rebellious voice against social injustice and inequality in his stories, and the criticism that his stories have faced.

Chapter IV is an extensive feminist reading of Maupassant‟s short stories, which begins by discussing the critical phenomenon of fin de siècle period. With the emergence of the „New Woman,‟ the period witnessed some drastic changes and upheavals in the gender divisions. As a result of the masculinity crises and gender chaos, the literature of the period became the platform for both the construction of negative representation of woman and deconstruction of already existing binaries and gendered divisions. This chapter, further, discusses Maupassant‟s complex and multidimensional representation of female characters while highlighting the ambiguity in his own personality. Though critics have called him a misogynist, there are numerous examples quoted from his stories wherein he has talked in support of women and has sympathetically portrayed their unprivileged life. However, some of his stories such as “A Public Meeting,” “Allouma,” and “Marroca” are filled with misogyny and racial stereotypes. Therefore, the chapter evaluates the female representation in Maupassant‟s stories, which emerges as extremely complex. Secondly, he himself as a macho figure, has presented many macho characters, especially stressing on moustaches and other conventional symbols of virility and manliness. This has been seen as a result of the masculinity crises witnessed in the latter half of the nineteenth century in France. Further, in this chapter, the study reveals how a woman has been presented as a victim of patriarchy, and literature has been one of the tools for degrading her and presenting her as a source of chaos. The analysis of various other stories of Maupassant in this chapter further reveals his 32 insight of female victimization. Lastly, the chapter also brings into notice some of the critics who have criticized Maupassant for his misogynist representation of woman— her existence as incomprehensible, unreasonable, perfidious and „angel in the house‟.

Chapter V is based on the same pattern as that of the previous chapter on Maupassant. It starts with Manto‟s proposition on prostitutes that “prostitutes are not born, they are made”, which like Simon de Beauvoir‟s claim that “woman is not born, rather becomes one”, stresses on the socially constructed female sexuality and identity. Prostitution is the dominant theme in his stories. Based on his real observations and experiences, these stories target various male-dominated social institutions such as marriage, prostitution and other socio-political institutions and highlight their hypocrisy and double standards. A feminist reading of Manto‟s short stories exposes various stark realities of women, victimized and exploited through different power controlling institutions. This chapter also discusses how female sexuality has been constructed through the powerful male gaze and rendered into the „other‟, against which Manto has successfully given his female characters a rebellious voice and a subjectivity in his various short stories. Besides issues of exploitation in the prostitution, these stories also represent a unique choice of economic liberty of prostitutes, pointed out by Wazir Agha thus: “the coin earned by the women is opposite to the coin of the paternal rule” (383). The chapter further makes some contrasts and comparisons between Manto‟s and Maupassant‟s attitudes towards women. The chapter further evaluates Manto‟s partition stories from a feminist perspective and attempts to highlight the atrocities to women which conventional histories fail to do. In “Khol Do” (Open it), “Thanda Gosht” (Cold Meat) and other partition stories, Manto slaps the face of humanity and shows how the patrons of humanity have turned into brutal perpetrators of violence against the female sex overnight and how the partition resulted in highly gendered violence. Chapter VI of the thesis is a comparative study of the vast thematic reach of both the writers from a feminist perspective. Particularly, it focuses on the dominant issues related to female sexuality in their stories. Whether it is the theme of prostitution, sex or sexuality, both the writers have a lot of similarities in their views; however, their differences also find a significant role in this chapter. The chapter is divided into many subsections. First, the chapter begins with an overview of female sexuality and its representation in general and in the times of both the writers in particular in order to frame the context of the study on the both sides - the socio-political revolution in the 33 second half of the nineteenth century in France and the „terrain of struggle‟ in the first half of the twentieth century in India. Second, Manto‟s individuality and the western influence, particularly of Maupassant, is discussed in order to create a sense of semblance among the two writers. Third, the modern tendencies in their writings, especially those which promote female emancipation, are highlighted. Fourth, this chapter very extensively discusses the masculinity crises, the theme both the short story writers have dealt with. Particularly this theme has been observed in Maupassant‟s stories, written in defence of conventional masculinity when it was questioned by the New Woman writers. These stories prove significant regarding the gender construction and objectification of female sexuality through the male gaze. Fifth, the multifaceted and multidimensional representation of female sexuality has been described by both storytellers from a unique point of view. Sixth, the female representation through different institutions is analyzed in comparison to each other. These power controlling institutions such home, prostitution, politics, and religion (creation of partition in Manto‟s case) have been only oppressors of female sexuality in different forms. This section has been further divided into subsections, discussing separately some of these patriarchal institutions. For example, the sexualized home, in which the role of the husband and wife are gender-based. Some chores are considered as masculine, while others as strictly feminine; however, both the authors have attempted to collapse the division. Therefore, marriage becomes a kind of prostitution. This thin layer between marriage and prostitution has been also pointed out by Manto in his nonfictional work “Ismat Faroshi” (prostitution) in which he says that when a woman loses her most gifted ornament, along with it she also loses her respect in society. Therefore, it is evident that both prostitution, in which she trades her virtue, and marriage are grouped into the same category, because in both cases she loses her most precious ornament, as Manto would call it. However, he adds that this virtue cannot be sold again and again, as it is commonly said about the prostitutes who are designated as „virtue- selling‟ (Memon 413). Therefore, in this section of the chapter, some stories are cited as references from both the authors whereby a radical view about a woman as a victim of various exploitations whether in marriage or prostitution is shown. Lastly, a conclusion on both writers has been drawn in consideration of the above-mentioned discussion. Chapter VII is the conclusion of the thesis which is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the overall impression of the study to build up the conclusion drawn thereof. The second part gives the chapter wise conclusion of the thesis.

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CHAPTER II

A Critical Assessment of the Life and Art of Guy de Maupassant

“I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt” ~Maupassant~

“Beauty is truth; truth is reality accurately observed, that is seen completely and distinctly, that is detached piece by piece from the complexity and confusion under which it exists in actual life, and so presented, piece by piece, to the reader. That is all”

~Faguet~

Outline

This chapter begins with an overview of the short-story criticism in general and it focuses on the second half of the nineteenth century in particular. This period has not received much critical attention, though it has produced the wealth of the genre more than ever. As a deep insight into the biography of Maupassant, the chapter further talks about his views regarding art and literature, an outcome of his literary relationship with Gustave Flaubert. Lastly, it talks about Maupassant’s ideas about writing, his approach towards life, and the criticism of his short stories.

1. Introduction to Short Story Criticism

The tradition of storytelling is as old as humanity itself. Irrespective of diverse languages, literatures, cultures and traditions, it has been ubiquitous, whether in oral or written form. Storytelling is a natural and most effective means of amusement, cultural preservation, moral upliftment and sharing of one‘s feelings and experiences. It portrays the different dimensions of the life in a smooth and imaginative narration. Throughout the history of literature, creative writers have expressed their tales and experiences of life in different genres, and the short story is one among many.

The short story in English literature is a very old form of narration; however, the short story criticism gained popularity recently. It was during the 1960s and 1970s that the short story criticism largely developed. Earlier, the criticism of the genre was only limited to the definitions and tracing its historical development. Critics had 39 confined their discussions within the boundaries of its developments and influences to draw parallels with the novel or more specifically, novelette. From the first decade of the twentieth century, a lot of books have been published in this context. In ―Some Aspects of the Short Story‖, Julio Cortazar compares the novel and short story with film and photograph respectively. The difference between a novel and novelette is of length only, as a novelette is shorter than a novel; however, the difference between novel and short-story is of kind. As Brander Mathews has explained it in The Philosophy of the Short-story that short-story does not mean only a story which is short, but it is more than that; it has essentially a unity of impression, which precisely a novel cannot have. It is often said that it follows the three unities of the French classic drama: it shows one action, at one place and in one day. Moreover, it deals with a single event, a single emotion or the series of emotions are called forth by a single situation (16). A novel can also deal, sometimes, with a single event, but it cannot have the effect of ―totality,‖ as Poe called it, the unity of impression. Another difference is that a novel often deals with love-tale, while a short-story needs not to deal with love at all. Although, there are various novels, of course, without the love theme, yet the majority of them deal with it. Further, Matthews says that novel cannot get on easily without love, because it is usually long, so love seems to be the only thing which gives interest in it. The short story, being very short, does not need a love-interest to hold its parts together, and the writer thus has a greater freedom (20). Suzanne C. Ferguson, however, in ―Defining the Short story: Impressionism and Form‖ makes a unique point that short story is not distinguished from the novel by some particular characteristic or cluster of characteristics, rather the modern short story is a manifestation of impressionism, not a discrete genre.

However, these critical topics about the short story genre have not been discussed in Professor Walter Raleigh's The English Novel and in Professor W. L. Cross‘s Development of the English Novel, or even in History of Prose Fiction by Dunlop, and therefore, a logical conclusion is that the criticism of short story is not as old as short story itself (Matthews 14).

It would be a great mistake not to acknowledge some important works in the field of short story criticism. One cannot think about venturing into the genre without having these books on his/her shelf. Some of the books and essays that deal critically with short story are The Short Story by Henry Seidel Canby, The Modern Short-Story 40 by Lucy Lilian Notestein, Our Short Story Writers by Blanche Colton Williams, Weaving the Short Story and The Fabric of Fiction by Douglas Bement, Reading the Short Story by Harry Shaw, The Short Story Case Book by O‘Brien Edward Joseph Harrington, Storytellers and Their Art edited by Trask, Georgianne, and Charles Burkhart, Coming to Terms with the Short Story and Reading for Storyness by Susan Lohafer, The Teller and the Tale edited by Wendell Aycock, Creative and Critical Approaches to the Short Story edited by Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr., Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story edited by Barbara Lounsberry, Susan Lohafer, Mary Rohrberger, Stephen Pett, and R. C. Feddersen. Besides, the best known short story critics and theorists such as Lohafer, Suzanne Ferguson, Austin Wright, and Mary Rohrberger were joined by new critics of the short story such as John Gerlach, Ian Reid, Susan Rochette Crawley, Hilary Siebert, and Suzanne Hunter Brown. Further, in recent decades, many critical and theoretical books such as Twentieth-Century Short Story Explication: 1961-1991 edited by Warren S. Walker, Re-reading the Short Story and Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980 by Clare Hanson, Sort Story Theory at a Crossroad edited by Susan Lohafer, Jo Ellyn Clarey etc. came on the scene. As noted by Clare Hanson in the ‗Introduction‘ to Re-reading the Short Story, these critics tried to redefine the genre in order to ―re-establish the short story as a legitimate subject for discussion‖ (qtd. in Aycock 337). Further, in ―Things out of Words: Towards a Poetics of Short Fiction‖ Hanson maintains that being framed with aesthetic devices which gives a sense of completeness, allowing gaps and absences, the short story can be accepted with a degree of mystery or elision in it, but not the novel. The ―sense of mystery‖ and the ―sense of manners,‖ which can be achieved from the texture of immediate surroundings, are the two qualities necessary for a short story, discussed by Flannery O‘Connor in ―Writing Short Stories‖. More importantly, V.S. Prichet in his ―Short Stories‖ considers short story as a hybrid, owing to cinema for its quickness and objectivity, to a poet and newspaper reporter, and much to the ―restlessness, the alert nerve, the scientific eye and the short breath of contemporary life‖ (qtd. in May N. pag.).

During the 1990s, amongst the significant books on the theory and criticism of the genre is Domenic Head‘s The Modernist Short Story, published in 1992. It discusses the modern short story from a Bakhtinian perspective, stressing on its modernist experimentations. However, these theories have mostly been determined by 41 an oversimplified perception of modernist practice. Head urges the modern critics to go beyond what he calls the ―visual artifact aesthetic‖ or the ―unity aesthetic,‖ the dominant form of criticism since Poe (qtd. in May N. pag.). Other critical theoretical books in this field in the last decade of the twentieth century are Andrew Levy‘s The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (1993), Speaking of the Short Story, edited by Farhat Iftekharuddin, Mary Rohrberger, and Maurice Lee (1997), and Short Stories in the Classroom, edited by Carole L. Hamilton and Peter Kratzke (1999).

Besides these, there are other numerous books and essays which are significant in the study of short story criticism. For example: The Contemporary Short Story: A Practical Manual by Harry Torsey Baker, The New Short Story Theories by Charles May, The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories by Elizabeth Bowen, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story by Frank O‘Connor, ―Some Aspects of the Short Story‖ by Julio Cortázar, The Anchor Book of Stories, ―From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850s‖ by Robert F. Marler, ―The Short Story and the Novel‖ by Alberto Moravia, ―Writing Short Stories‖ by Flannery O‘Connor and many more. O‘Connor‘s The Lonely Voice, besides analyzing the greatest short story writers, discusses the techniques and its succinct form in which ―a whole lifetime must be crowded into a few minutes‖ (O‘Connor 22). This book has been very significant in understanding the genre and the nineteenth-century short story in the present study.

Florence Goyet in his ―Introduction‖ to The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre, talks about the birth, shape and revival of short story criticism in the late 1960‘s and 1970‘s, especially in works like Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story: A Study in Genre (1966) by Mary Rohrberger, in which he has defined the short story as an epiphany, revealing to the reader that ―there is more to the world than which can be discovered through the senses‖ (qtd. in Goyet 3). It was after ten years later that Charles E. May described this little genre as ―mythic and spiritual … intuitive and lyrical‖ (qtd. in Goyet 3-4). These critical descriptions and definitions by critics were drawn only after they viewed the genre in a complete form. They have taken into consideration its history from Frederick Barthelme and Alice Munro to Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Anton Chekhov and also Hawthorne‘s ‗invention‘ of the genre at the beginning of the nineteenth century 42

(Goyet 4). But unfortunately, critics have missed and left out a crucial link by ignoring the last decades of the nineteenth century, despite the fact that this period has produced a greater number of classic short stories than any other period. For example, the short stories written by the masters of the genre like Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, Luigi Pirandello, Henry James, Mori Ōgai and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, to name a few, belong to this period. About this period Clare Hanson made an important claim that it initiated a whole tradition in itself: the ―short story,‖ as opposed to ―short fiction‖ (5). The literature, particularly the short story genre, of this period has been neglected only because it belongs to what is called as ―naturalistic‖ or in the words of Rohrberger, as being only ―simple narratives‖ (Rohrberger 5). Naturalists, so influential across Europe, like Émile Zola, Gerhart Hauptmann, Giovanni and Leonid Andreyev, Nikolai Leskov and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, or even Pirandello and Maupassant, have been paid only a cursory glance.

The naturalists, as put by Emile Zola in his The Experimental Novel (1880), were ―observers‖ in the spirit of the physiologist (Zola 50). ―The observer relates purely and simply the phenomena which he has under his eyes… He should be the photographer of phenomena; his observation should be an exact representation of nature‖ (Zola 6). They only ―report‖ with their merit of exact observation of minute details of nature (nature of things). They depicted the reality with extreme observation. Majority of the naturalists belonged to the nineteenth-century and the period was about the emphasis on the essential simplicity, contrary to the characteristics of short stories prior to this period. Earlier, for example, Goethe typified his Novelle as ‗a peculiar and as yet unheard-of event‘ (Eckermann 163), and Poe wanted a certain unique or single effect on the reader for which he invented such incidents and then combined them as it might aid him best in establishing this preconceived effect. As an illustration, Goyet cited Verga in his theoretical preamble to Gramigna’s Mistress¸ in which he says that

…First for simplicity of subjects in the short story: the setting must be from everyday life, its heroes chosen from ―ordinary‖ people. Then he also insists there should be simplicity of treatment: the reader must be put ―face to face with the naked and unadulterated fact‖ and will not have to work through the author‘s interpretation. The short story is a linear account, where ―the hand of the artist will remain absolutely 43

invisible‖. As a contribution to the ―science of the human heart‖, it is the ideal form for presenting a ―slice of life‖. In other words — and Verga insists on this point — it must renounce grandiloquent ―effects‖ in favour of psychological truth. (qtd. in Goyet 15-16)

Among the naturalists, Maupassant‘s name gleams out bright from the history of the short story genre in particular and French fiction in general. His contribution to the literature and language and specifically to the genre is immense; especially, as far as the experiments with techniques and other thematic issues are concerned. Leslie A. Flemming also acknowledges his unavoidable influence on the short story while reviewing the genre in particular and the historical development of fiction in general. She says that the novel and short story genre developed recently in European languages. She traced the lineage of the short story back to the tradition of telling tales in the ancient times, but it was only in the 1850s that the modern shape or form of short story developed, such as the tales of the American writers, Hawthorne, Melville and Poe. Further, she asserts that the structural maturity of the short story developed completely in the hands of Maupassant and others. In Flemming‘s words:

Maupassant, whose first short story, ―Boule de Suif,‖ was published in 1880, is generally considered to be the first to write the structured, integrated story, dealing realistically with a single event in the life of a single character usually alienated from those around him, i.e., the short story as it is now known. Using Flaubert‘s objective method, in which a neutral third person narrator describes only what would be seen by an astute observer, Maupassant was also the first to combine in his stories incisive portraits of lower class characters with realistic picture of French urban life. (92)

Moreover, Flemming states that other classical writers of the world, especially Russian short writers such as Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gorky, followed the footprints of Maupassant and adopted his choice of subject and characters belonging to lower class who have been alienated and oppressed by the hierarchal social system. She further adds: ―In contrast to Maupassant, who combined with the objective method a well-structured plot, Chekhov, and also to a lesser extent Gorki, provided no more than an inconclusive plot. However, both excelled at using a series of impressionistic details to convey a particular atmosphere‖ (92). 44

Therefore, among the contemporaries, Maupassant‘s artistic innovations in form, structure and content has been followed by writers from all over the world. Not only French literature, but other major literatures of the world owe a lot to his artistic creativity in fiction. Beyond the literatures in European languages, Maupassant‘s influence also dominated the genre of short story in Hindi and Urdu literature. Introduced through different translations, his influence on world literature is huge, especially as far as his technique and style of writing are concerned. Similarly, the translations of his various works helped both in introducing the short story genre and the new techniques of writing to Urdu literature.

2. Life and Writings

Guy de Maupassant‘s life is considered ―entirely devoid of incident‖ (Doumic 214) because he had kept his life securely hidden and left the world in ignorance of any event that had a decisive influence over his creativity. He has never spoken of his life in his works, and he ―considered that nothing concerning the writer belongs to the public with the exception of his work‖ (Doumic 218). Maupassant would persistently refuse if someone would attempt to inquire about his life. ―He closed his doors against all indiscreet inquirers, and protested in advance against all possible indiscretions; he raised an effectual wall between himself and his fellow-men‖ (Doumic 217). Both due to his bent of nature and his habit of studying, he lived a solitary and secluded life. He was surrounded by silence, solitude, melancholy, and loneliness that provided a peculiar dignity to his character.

Born in Chateau de Miromesnil near Dieppe in Normandy on 5 August 1850, Henri-Rene-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was the son of a successful local director of a national tobacco monopoly and a gentleman farmer, Gustave de Maupassant. His mother, from a bourgeois family of le Poittevins, was a brilliant and strong-willed neurotic, but more cultivated than her husband. Her brother, Alfred Pouttevin, a student of literature and philosophy, was a close friend of Gustave Flaubert. She was also a lover of classical literature, especially Shakespeare. The contradictory disposition of both the husband and wife resulted in a bitter and unfruitful relationship, which consequently had a deleterious effect on their children.

It is said that when Guy de Maupassant was born, the doctor assured the parents that because of the child‘s round head he would grow an active brain and a first rate intelligence. Maupassant grew up a very bright little boy. His sensitive mind began to 45 notice everything around him. After few years, the family left Miromesnil and rented another chateau, the Chateau Blanc, at Grainveille-Ymanuville near Etretat. The chateau was one of the Maupassant‘s early memories that he later retained in many sketches. It also became the background for many of his stories and novels. Further, he would write to his mother, especially in his school days, about every incident that would happen around him. He has himself recounted that until the age of thirteen, he used to be joyful, pleased with everything, jolly of being alive. He was very fond of cats and fighting with them would give him an ultimate pleasure. But everything changed all of the sudden and a particular event appeared to him as if ―the end of the world had come, that the eternal laws had changed‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 11). The change is a reference to an event that he had encountered when he was just thirteen. He saw his parents arguing about some money. His father was very harshly asking Laure le Poittevin, Maupassant‘s mother, some money which she refused him by saying: ―I have no desire to see you throw it [money] away on the housemaids and your other women, the way you threw your own money‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 11). Consequently, his father, trembling in rage, seized Laurel and hit her again and again. This situation showed Maupassant the other side of the reality which his parents were hiding by pretending to be in love. Since then, according to him, he had not seen the good side anymore. This event had a severe effect on Maupassant‘s consciousness and thus he has produced many stories with the same theme of the humiliation of women, especially by their husbands. This theme of humiliation of woman later became his favourite one; however, the source of it was his own home, his mother‘s humiliation by her husband.

After this incident, Maupassant‘s mother was determined to get a divorce from her husband, though it was very difficult in those days in Paris. But finally, the disharmony between Maupassant‘s parents became obvious in 1863 when they formally separated. The dowry that she had brought with her was sufficient for the family to live a luxurious life. Therefore, after the divorce, she lived with her two sons, Maupassant and Herve. Maupassant was now totally under the influence of his mother. Even though his father sometimes used to visit the family, Guy‘s partisanship was complete and permanent. Maupassant was well aware of the disharmonious relationship and his mother‘s suffering, which he described as: ―Poor mother! How she has been crushed, beaten, martyred without mercy since her marriage!‖ (qtd. in 46

Steegmuller 12). Maupassant would often think about the unfortunate relationship that existed between his father and mother. The unhappy domestic life in his home gave vent to his artistic creation and the subjugation and inequality suffered by his mother further impacted his works.

Maupassant‘s life was a kind of a ―runaway colt‘ - a phrase used by his mother to describe his childhood temperament. Until thirteen he used to be free, enjoying the pleasant sunshine on beautiful beaches of Etretat, where he grew and became very fond of fishing and other open-air activities. But soon his happy childhood began to vanish as he was sent to a seminary near Rouen where he witnessed the unhappy three years of his childhood. The three years in the seminary, under the strict ―black-robed priestly teachers and rigid discipline,‖ changed everything in his life. It was like a prison for Maupassant, who had been until then a ―runaway colt‖. The life here was so horrible that he has described it in ‗Une Surprise‘ (A Surprise) as:

I can never think of the place even now without a shudder, it smelled of prayers the ways a fish-market smells of fish. Oh! That dreary school, with its eternal religious ceremonies, its freezing Mass every morning, its periods of meditations, its gospel-recitations, and the reading form pious books during meals! Oh! Those dreary days passed within those cloistering walls! (qtd. in Steegmuller 17)

The horrible effect of the seminary on him was so deep that years later at another place he declared that ―even as a small boy religious rites and ceremonies offended me. I could see only their ridiculous side‖ (qtd. in Boyd 4). During these years he came under the influence of poet Louis Bouilhet and also read Schopenhauer. Their influence was responsible for developing his pessimistic attitude towards life and his misogynist attitude towards women. Maupassant‘s unhappiness at the school made him take refuge in writing. But very soon he was expelled from the seminary for writing an obscene poem.

After the expulsion, he was once more happily spending his days on the sunny beach of Etretat. It was there that one day he saved a swimmer who was drowning near one of the cliffs. The rash swimmer was an English poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, who had recently arrived in Etretat as a guest to another Englishman. Maupassant was very enthusiastic about swimming, boating, travelling and other heavy activities. ―Of medium height, sturdily muscular and ruddy,‖ Zola recorded, 47

―he was at that time a terrific oarsman, able to row fifty miles on the Seine in one day for pleasure. Besides, he was a proud he-man, and told us dumbfounding stories about women, amorous swaggering that sent Flaubert into roars of laughter‖ (qtd. in Boyd 68).

Next, Maupassant was enrolled at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen, where Louis Bouilhet, a close friend of Flaubert and a writer by profession, became his guardian. Bouilhet‘s guidance and artistic sense inspired young Maupassant who began to write poetry with a great output. This also rekindled and sprouted anew the old friendship between his mother and Flaubert, whose mentorship would later on shape Maupassant‘s literary career. Maupassant used to meet Bouilhet for several weeks on Sundays in his own house or in Flaubert‘s. He used to make corrections in young poet‘s scripts. During these years Guy was pursuing law studies.

Soon after his graduation in 1870, Maupassant volunteered to serve in the French-German (Franco-Prussian) war. After finishing the training, he was posted as a clerk in the Navy Department at Rouen. During his service in the government department, he was able to collect the material for his writings through his close contact with boulevard journals, aptly demonstrated by the types of men and women in his second novel ―Bel Ami‖ or The History of a Scoundrel. Afterwards, through his father‘s acquaintances, he got a post at the Ministry‘s Department for the Colonies. There he started writing verses, stories and plays besides boating on holidays on the Seine and socializing with women in the vacation spot of Argenteuil.

To Maupassant writing was a sort of ‗liberation‘; liberation from the ministry desk, from the position of civil service clerk and from the inability to live. Also, it was liberation from the boring world which he had been living in, particularly when troubled by the illness and faints of hysteria. Like many great writers, Maupassant too started his career by writing poetry and the bulk of his poetry produced two collections, Au bord de l’eau (At Waterfront) and Venus Rustique (Rustic Venus). As a matter of fact, nearly all of his contemporary prose writers have begun their literary careers by writing verses, even it is true of the classic prose master M. Alexandre Dumas as well. Maupassant also wrote under many pseudonyms. For instance, he wrote Les Femmes under the pen name of Maufrigneuse, describing various types of Parisiennes. Next, in his Politiciennes, written under the same pen name, Maupassant talked about women‘s hidden roles in politics. His Galanterie Sacree (Holy 48

Dalliance) deals with women‘s sentimental attachments for priests; and throughout one or two years he wrote almost weekly in the Gil-Blas under the same pen name, Maufrigneuse. Joseph Prunier and Guy de Valmont are his other pen names (Steegmuller 143-44).

Before completely turning his attention towards writing short stories, Maupassant wrote a number of articles which have been mostly published in The Gaulois and Gil-Blas. His mother, Laure, always insisted him to leave this newspaper work and begin some ―serious work,‖ which, of course, referred to fiction as opposed to newspaper articles. Thereafter, Maupassant turned completely towards short stories and produced stories one after the other, such as ―Un Coq Chanta‖ (A Cock Crowed), ―Farce Normande‖ (A Normandy Joke), ―Mon Oncle Sosthene‖ (My Uncle Sosthenes) and many others, which also appeared in Gil-Blas. This was the climax of Maupassant‘s evolution as a short story writer. These stories were his supreme risqué stories. One of his biographers, Steegmuller, called these stories ‗Maupassantian‘ because mentioning his name alone would automatically bring these stories into one‘s mind. These stories have been much discussed. Critics, such as Henry James in an essay on Maupassant called these stories ―indecent‖. Moreover, Jules Lemaitre called him an ―almost irreproachable author in a genre that is not‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 158). Therefore, Maupassant produced a type of stories which contained his own individuality and uniqueness. Every great critic of the age praised him for his individuality.

The shift from newspaper articles to short stories was important not only in terms of Maupassant‘s evolution as a writer, but also as the chief source of his financial prosperity. He was soaring very high. In his own words, ―I, a journalist, indeed! I am a bird - see my wings!‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 161).

The first volume was followed by another volume of short stories whose title story, ―Mademoiselle Fifi,‖ is similar to ―Boule de Suif‖ as far its subject matter is concerned. In this collection, Maupassant has also introduced a dramatic note. Then in the following years, his other short story volumes such as ―Clair de Lune‖ (Moonlight), ―Les Soeurs Rondoli‖ (The Rondoli Sisters), ―Miss Harriet‖ and many others came one after the other which sold well in a dozen languages.

Besides hundreds of short stories, Maupassant has also written six novels, among which some are considered masterpieces. His novels present the entire life of 49

Normandy, from the low life of peasants and prostitutes to the elite bourgeois of capitalist society. For example, his novel, Une Vie (A Life), depicts the life of the provincial gentry. It is the story of a woman from the hour of her heart‘s awakening until her death. Stylistically the book was very close to his master, Flaubert, but thematically it is more relevant to the facts of his mother‘s life than any other of his novels or stories. In this novel, the heroine, Jeanne Le Perthuis des Vauds, is shown as less intelligent and less independent. She is shown as a good Norman woman, belonging to a family which does not insist on separation but allows her husband to continue his humiliating escapades until he wrecks her life. Like Maupassant‘s mother, Jeanne in the novel is portrayed as a suppressed woman who is deceived and humiliated by her husband; like Laure, she also travels to Corsica, undergoes nervous disorders, loses religious beliefs and suffers from the maltreatment by her younger son, Paul. This novel portrays the most sympathetic suffering virtue. The novel was widely appreciated. Tolstoy declared it, ―the best French novel since Les Miserables,‖ and said that in it Maupassant was ―a serious man whose gaze penetrated deep into life‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 170). This book was also placed on the list of France‘s ten greatest novels.

The year of publication of Maupassant‘s other huge success Perrie et Jeans (1887), a short naturalistic or psycho-realist novel, marks his English and American year of canonization. It is also mentioned in Henry James‘ powerful essay ―Guy de Maupassant‖ in which Maupassant has been placed in the French tradition of greatest fiction writers. Further, in commenting on the keenness of Maupassant‘s physical senses he says: ―the sense par excellence, the sense which we scarcely mention in English fiction, and which I am not very sure I shall be allowed to mention in an English periodical‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 275). James considered Maupassant‘s best short stories as ―a collection of masterpieces‖ and ―gems of narration‖. James further adds:

The author fixes a hard eye on some small spot of human life, usually some ugly, dreary, shabby, sordid one, takes up the particle, and squeezes it either till it grimaces or till it bleeds. Sometimes the grimace is very droll, sometimes the wound is very horrible…M. de Maupassant sees human life as a terribly ugly business relieved by the comical‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 275) 50

To describe Maupassant as a short story writer of senses, Henry James has also used the epithet ―a lion in the path‖ in an essay by the same title in his book Partial Portraits. James actually has referred to Maupassant‘s purely sensual point of view, which made him a ―case‖ that was ―embarrassing and mystifying for the moralist‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 325). Today, according to Steegmuller, the phrase could be used in a sense that ―M. de Maupassant, who is at once so licentious and so impeccable,‖ is a highly imposing figure in the literary path, considerably more imposing than many critics, since James had been inclined to admit (Steegmuller 325). ―It is through [the senses] alone, or almost alone, that life appeals to him,‖ said Henry James; ―it is almost alone by their help that he describes it, that he produces brilliant works‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 353). The same kind of view has been pointed out by Benedetto Croce when he says:

Because he is a poet, Maupassant, who know nothing save the material and the sensual, and depicts nothing save obscure shudder of matter and spasm of senses, makes use of so much objective truth in his narrative that, thanks to grief, pity and disgust, it seems to be alive and to present ethical ideality; thanks to the comic and laughable, the superiority of well-balanced intellect; thanks to desolation and despair, the necessity for religion…(qtd. in Steegmuller 353)

Maupassant from his childhood suffered from various mental and other illnesses which he had been sharing with his mother and friends by writing to them lengthy letters. He used to write to her frequently. He used to write to her like a child, even when he was quite a young man. According to Steegmuller, these letters gave meaning to the phrases which his mother Laure would use for him when he was just fifteen; phrases such as ―his nerves are not strong‖; ―his impressionable, sensitive nature‖. Maupassant suffered a lot due to the constant illness which, according to some of his biographers, was in his heredity. But this illness, which created a kind of fear in him, had one benefit. It made him write day and night very hastily and produce masterpieces. Rene Doumic has best described the ceaseless literary life of Maupassant thus:

A LIFE wholly comprised in ten years of incessant literary production, in labor that was prolific without haste; starting with the instant conquest of celebrity and ending suddenly in hopeless madness; the 51

life of a man who sought to enjoy everything with his mind and body at the same time; of an artist who, from the day when he created his first work of art until the final hour when the pen dropped from his fingers, never experienced the slightest diminution of talent, but advanced steadily with his eyes fixed on perfection; a brief and crowded life, which has a beauty of its own from the aesthetic standpoint, and a certain moral beauty also, since in the struggle with the difficulties of form and the more poignant struggle against the encroachments of his malady, it testifies to a continual effort of will — such is the life of Maupassant! (215)

The last days of Maupassant ended horribly. However, Maupassant continued to work tirelessly, until he was immobilized by neuralgia and was nearly blind. Once in a state of delirium, Maupassant even attempted to commit suicide, though he failed. This sensational news titled ‗A French Sensation‘ was published in San Franciso Call / The Morning Call also. Saved by his valet, he thereafter was committed to an asylum, where he breathed his last days and died in the summer of 1893, at the age of forty-two in ―Les Ravenelles‖, and his final cry was “Au rancart! au rancart!” (In the scrap heap! Shelved).

3. Influences

A writer can never escape the impact of the age he lives in. There is certainly the influence of a particular period upon the author and vice-versa. This mutual influence shapes the literature produced in that period. If we delve into literary history, we can see that the relation between artists and their art, their lives and the work they did, have remained, in some cases, untraced and obscure despite every effort of research. Contrary to this, some writers are the product of a particular set of circumstances. They seem to be the result of a given upbringing, of a precise tutelage, and of a chosen career. Similarly, the individuality and peculiarity of Maupassant‘s age had a great role in his literary career and artistic development. The evolution and development, whether of his personal or artistic life, is straightforward and coherent: his boyhood at Etretat and Yvetot, his schooldays at Rouen, his clerkship at a public department in Paris etc. are the intrinsic elements of his artistic life ( Crewe, Intro. to P&J v-vi). Although, there were both subjective and objective schools of thought, however, he belonged to the school of objective romance. He was one of the keenest 52 and closest observers of real life. His power of minute observation and the right direction by his mentor, Gustave Flaubert, are the sole sources of his artistic inspiration.

Maupassant‘s mother was very much interested in reading philosophy and literature. To make her son a serious writer, she sent him to her friend, Gustave Flaubert, for his literary apprenticeship. After the death of Louis Hyacinthe Bouilhet, a French poet and dramatist, on July 18, 1869, Flaubert became the father figure and mentor of Maupassant who used to visit him on Sundays. There he made his first acquaintances with Turgenev, Alphonse Daudet, Zola and Demond de Goncourt.

Flaubert taught Maupassant three things during the literary relationship of ten years - to be conscientious of narration, patience in evolving the right means of expression and discrimination in the choice of words. The art of expression which Maupassant learned from his teacher was the rare gift of this apprenticeship. The relationship of teacher and disciple became an example to the world, and ―never perhaps in the history of letters did the relation of master and disciple dovetail more nicely than between Flaubert and Maupassant‖ (Crew vii). Primarily it was under the tutelage of Flaubert and ―in the glamorous slipstream of Emile Zola (1840-1902), that Maupassant embarked upon his career as a writer; the publication of his short story Boule de Suif in Zola‘s anthology Les Soirees de Medan (1880) constituted something of an arrival - and the beginning of a period of extraordinary creativity‖ (Pearson viii). In a letter, Flaubert, after re-reading ―Boule de Suif,‖ declared it as a masterpiece and added: ―Tache d'en faire une douzaine comme ca! et tu seras un home!‖ (Spot to make a dozen like that! and thou shalt be a man!) (qtd. in Riddell 5). Moreover, Flaubert also advised him: ―Your whore is charming! If you could reduce her belly at the beginning, you would do me a favour‖ (qtd. in Boyd 67). Flaubert would always guide him in every respect. Mme de Maupassant once remarked that it was Flaubert who wished Maupassant to become a novelist; although, he had tried his hand in all kinds of composition during his seven years‘ apprenticeship. Flaubert advised Maupassant that one must not allow his mode of life to interfere with his art. ―A man who aspires to the name of artist has no right to live as do others; his only principle must be the necessity of sacrificing everything to art‖ (Riddell 6). This literary circle, including English writer Henry James, would discuss art and literature. Further, they 53 were held by one convention that art and morality are two perfectly different things; they have nothing to do with each other.

As Flaubert‘s literary disciple and a great friend, Maupassant admired Flaubert more than anyone else: ―he used to speak of him as his spiritual father… who had lent French prose divine grace and harmony‖ (Harris 263). Maupassant‘s praise of other writers was often astoundingly generous. It is true that the impersonality of Maupassant was the direct influence of Flaubert on him. Maupassant would call it ―impassible‖ rather than impersonal. This impersonality, as both the writers marked, is hard to maintain. Maupassant has aptly defined the impersonality and the general notion regarding the reflection of an author in his works. According to him, such appearance or reflection is inevitable, because all the views about the world given by a writer must be derived from his personal observations and reflections. It is important to note that impersonality to Maupassant is not the complete absence of an author from his work, that is impossible, but ―the artistic concealment of the author‘s inescapable presence in his work‖ (Riddell 22). The same conclusion can be traced from Flaubert when he says: “L'auteur dans son oeuvre doit etre comme Dieu dans 1’univers present partout et visible nulle part” (The author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere) (qtd. in Riddell 22). The definition given by Maupassant affirms that the impersonality, which is very difficult to maintain, is the apparent concealment of one‘s subjectivity. He has also forsaken the impersonal attitude very easily and often more completely than his master. While presenting the lives of peasants and fishermen in his works, such as Bel-Ami, “La Parure‖ (The Ornament), “L'héritage‖ (The Heritage) and many others, he has been impersonal on the whole. But on the other hand, stories like the ―Boule de Suif‖ are too ironical to be impersonal. In his later stories, Maupassant gave up gradually the impersonal attitude and began to express, either directly or through his characters, his sympathy for the sufferings of downtrodden people, especially women. Also, his various other stories record his own distress. (Riddell 23)

Further, Maupassant under the apprenticeship of Flaubert, learnt how ―to see with his eyes,‖ (Mason 53) and to depict the world exactly as observed by eyes. ―He pathetically believed that his works were a mirror reflecting all the world, with the sole exception of their author‖ (Mason 53-54). His stories are set mainly in his familiar Normandy landscape in which the characters are the actual peasants; the 54 majority of whom he knew and others he had heard about. The subjects and themes of his stories are the actual events. Though the people and subjects are known, the narration remains very much impersonal. Nonetheless, artistic works always bear some traces of its creator. For example, some of the stories shudder with Maupassant‘s fear of death and remind us of the last eighteen months of his life that he spent as a lunatic in an asylum.

Maupassant‘s biographer Steegmuller describes that under the influence of Flaubert, Maupassant also learnt that talent is a long patience, which one needs to realize and if one is not gifted with such talent, he must acquire it. He also taught Maupassant the expression and description of things. According to Flaubert, in this world, there are not two grains of sand, two flies, two hands or two noses that are absolutely the same. So we have to describe the thing exactly what it is, particularize it clearly, to distinguish it from all the other beings or all the other objects of the same race or kind. He taught him that a thing is expressed only through a particular word, not by some other word. This single word as a description for a sheep does not resemble any other in the whole folk of sheep. When you learn to use that word, you will become the master of storytelling (Steegmuller 61). In the words of Flaubert quoted by Steegmuller:

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word that will express it, one verb to make it move, one adjective to qualify it. You must seek that word, that verb, and that adjective, and never be satisfied with approximations, never resort to tricks, even clever ones, or to verbal pirouettes, to escape the difficulty. (61)

Since Flaubert obviously knew about Maupassant‘s mind and power of observation, he stressed certain themes that he wanted Maupassant should focus upon. Flaubert would say, ―You will go to such a street, where you will see a concierge and his parrot; you will then write down what you saw and read it to me;‖ and till Flaubert pronounced, ―Now I see the picture‖ (qtd. in De Bury 23). Brunetiere‘s words, ―There is too much Flaubert in him‖ (qtd. in Riddell 12) best illustrate the influence of the master on Maupassant. Further, Riddell talks about Maupassant‘s use of irony and precision of form. The influence of Flaubert can also be seen from certain books by Maupassant or some scenes in his writings which are more or less directly derived from certain books or scenes by Flaubert. To affirm this point, the best examples may 55 be his Une Vie and Bel-Ami, which Maupassant has borrowed mostly from Flaubert‘s Madame Bovary and L’Education Sentimentale respectively (Riddell 13). Moreover, Maupassant paid his tribute by recording his memories of Flaubert in his half-a-dozen articles, with a fine preface, published in a Quantin edition of Bouvard et Pecucbet in 1885.

The literary relationship of Flaubert and Maupassant remained an everlasting example and no other such literary relationship of mentor and disciple has been hailed so much in the whole literary history. Perhaps it would not be out of place to assume that Maupassant would not have achieved the name and fame which he achieved without Flaubert‘s true guidance in the literary path.

4. Maupassant: Art, Ideas and Criticism

There are many volumes of Maupassant‘s writings, comprising of over three hundred short stories, six novels, about two hundred essays and articles, two plays, two collections of poetry and three books of travel writings. Generally, the background of his stories is the Franco-German war; but there are also some other stories which are expressive of emotions of people like farmers and officials who belong to diverse sections of society. He has narrated ―the story of the farmers and officials on the banks of the river Seine and those that deal with the emotional life of the people belonging to different sections in the society‖ (Surendran 115). His characters are mainly taken from Normandy, the place where he was born and reared up, thus creating a picture of a world full of ―landscapes and personages, thorough- fares and market-places, taverns and tribunals‖ (Johnston 302).

Maupassant was one of the greatest fiction writers, who possessed an invincible passion for writing. His incessant labour, his tireless, ceaseless activity of mind and his measureless treasure in the short story writing made him the father of the French short story. As a true artist, he had studied his profession like a sculptor, painter, and architect. In opposition to the writing through unconscious production, he strove for a systemized production of literature, and ―spurned the idea of writing without the most careful preparation‖ (Johnston 300). Also, Maupassant has been one of the most whole-hearted story-tellers of French Literature; his strong, simple, and natural language has a flavour of the native soil that makes readers love him dearly. The most important characteristic of his stories is his clarity of expression which is beautifully expressed France in the following words: 56

He possesses the three great qualities of the French writer, first, clearness, then again, clearness, and lastly, clearness. He has the feeling of proportion and order which is the feeling of our race. He writes as a good Norman landowner lives, with economy and joy. Sly, pawky, a good fellow, something of a boaster, a little foppish, ashamed of nothing but his large native kindliness, careful to hide what is most exquisite in his soul, full of sound sense, no dreamer, little curious of the things beyond the tomb, believing only what he sees, and reckoning only on what he touches, the man belongs to us, he is a fellow countryman‖ (146).

It will be an error if we identify Maupassant with his characters because he has never painted his character in his own emotional colour. Rather they were created by an artist, without hate and love, or anger and pity. His characters are usually the miserly peasants, drunken sailors, lost women, cheap clerks dazed by their toil, and all those humble beings whose humanity is as devoid of beauty as of virtue. They are the real people whom Maupassant had observed minutely with his own eyes. Furthermore, as Anatole France maintains that:

He shows us all these grotesques and all these unfortunates so distinctly that we believe we see them before our eyes and find them more real than reality itself. He makes them live, but he does not judge them. We do not know what he thinks of those scoundrels, rogues, and blackguards whom he has created and who haunt us. He is a skilful artist, and he knows that he has done all that is needed when he has given life. (46–47)

Henry James, in his Partial Portraits, illustrates the importance of Guy de Maupassant by noting two essential characteristics: ―The first of which is that his gifts are remarkably strong and definite, and the second that he writes directly from them, as it were: holds the fullest, the most uninterrupted I scarcely know what to call it the boldest communication with them‖ (249). The gift might have been the gift of perception or what Maupassant called illusions to see the world and create the truths, and, according to him, these illusions vary as men vary from each other in taste, smell, perception etc. Maupassant was of the view that the writer should be faithful in reproducing these illusions with all the art that he has at his command. Maupassant 57 further adds, ―The great artists are those who make humanity accept their particular illusion‖ (qtd. in James 247). His own illusions or perceptions were extraordinarily alive and strong enough that made him produce twenty volumes of writing. Imagination is always there in any creative work, but to quote Henry James, Guy de Maupassant‘s senses alone made him produce such brilliant works of art. He states: ―His own is that of the senses, and it is through them alone, or almost alone, that life appeals to him; it is almost alone by their help that he describes it, that he produces brilliant works‖ (250).

Henry James was of the view that the vision of Maupassant was the ―vision of ugliness‖, and when it is not, even then there is ―a certain absence of love, a sort of bird‘s-eye-view contempt‖ (James 252). According to Maupassant, a ‗realist‘ should be called an ‗illusionist‘ because he not only depicted reality but more than the reality. He interprets life more orderly and presents it ―more complete, more startling and more convincing than reality itself‖ (qtd. in Rees N. pag.), rather copying like a photographer.

The most characteristic feature that differentiates Maupassant and his other contemporary writers is the discernible impersonality. Maupassant represents nature ―truthfully‖. Maupassant has two classical qualities upon which there is practical unanimity of opinions: one is his realism, in the selective sense of the term, and the other is his impersonality. Both the qualities have been summed up by Agnes Rutherford Riddell as:

The faithful representation of nature denotes not the servile transcription of facts but rather the ‗translation‘ of those facts in terms of probability, through the subordination of the less to the more important, and through the selection of the universal and constant to the exclusion of the accidental and ephemeral. (24)

Thus to Maupassant, it is not only the matter and method of ‗seeing‘ but expressing the impressions in few suitable words. This skilful representation is called ―characteristic detail‖. It involves the precise attention to all details, even the character‘s inner psychological state. Maupassant has used the ‗characteristic detail‘ constantly, which is not accidental but is inherent by nature in the object described; descriptions are easily grasped, and once grasped, it becomes easy to summarize them in one or two words and can be remembered without any difficulty (Riddell 25-26). 58

For example, his description of the dwelling on Forestier‘s ill-health and Mme Forestier‘s smile in Bel-Ami, the one by one description of the travelers in the diligence of Boule de Suif, and the ending of the story entitled ―Le Pere‖ with a sentence, giving the outstanding aspect of the conduct of the ‗father,‘ are best examples illustrating the power of his ―characteristic detail‖ (Riddell 27). In that period, Flaubert declared that it is the time to give to art the precision of the physical science, however, to Maupassant ―art was mathematical, and the great effect were to be obtained by simple and well-combined means,‖ and the most important among all these means is the ―mot juste‖ (the exact, appropriate word), that is usually connected with his idea of the inevitable correspondence between sound and sense. (Riddell 28)

It is a fact that no man owes more to his experiences than Maupassant to create living stories, because as an impersonal writer, ―instead of seeking an indirect means of bringing himself upon the scene, [he] has for his sole object to create a world of individuals animated with a life of their own‖ (Doumic 219). His characters such as Boule de Souf, Mouche, Rosier de Mme, Morin etc., did actually exist in the real life. Sometimes, in his various stories, Maupassant has used those themes which were told to him by his friends and M. Emile Faguet‘s ―Revue Bleue” gives a very good account of when and by whom. The realism of Maupassant, producing stories out of real events, has been also noted in A Literary History of France by Emile Faguet as: ―…The last in date, to all appearance, of realistic novelists, he is realistic without the least alloy; he discourages imitation by the perfection of his art, and he is the greatest of realists…‖ (622)

Maupassant has portrayed his characters candidly and clearly. His descriptions are without least vague or ambiguous. This quality of Maupassant made Faguet write that the historians of literature should be grateful to Guy de Maupassant. Like a painter, Maupassant portrayed only what he observed. Further,

Maupassant has no system, no critical faculty, no reading, and hardly any ideas. He was born to see things and to paint what he saw, and for that only. But what is then that he catches his readers, and delights and amazed then is his power of ―observation with miraculous completeness and intensity‖. (Faguet 622)

Though various critics have associated Maupassant with the schools of French Realism and Naturalism, Maupassant clearly maintains that he does not belong to any 59 school of thought. Like Sadat Hasan Manto, he too has repudiated his association with any -ism or group. He was only writing for art‘s sake. He says that they (Maupassant and his circle) were a group of friends who were drawn to Zola by their common admiration for him. Their closeness is because of their common temperaments, similarity of ideas and philosophical tendencies. Furthermore, Guy de Maupassant states:

As to quarrels over the words ‗realism‘ and ‗idealism,‘ I do not understand them. An inflexible law of philosophy teaches us that we can imagine nothing save what touches our sense, and a proof of this powerlessness is the stupidity of what is called ideal conception, of the paradises invented by all religions. We have but one objective, therefore: Man and Life, which must be interpreted artistically. If one cannot express there in a manner both correct and artistically superior, it is for lack of talent. When a gentleman who is called realist strives to write as well as possible, and is incessantly preoccupied with questions of art, he is, in my sense, an idealist. As for those who profess to make life more beautiful than nature - as if one could conceive it other than it is - to bring down heaven to earth, and who write ‗for women only,‘ they are either charlatans or fools, at least in my opinion. (qtd. in Boyd 82-83)

Although naturalism can be found almost in his all stories, yet he harshly criticized Zola for preaching it. However, his masterpiece ―Boule de Suif‖ which appeared in a naturalist collection, ―did more than the poems to dissociate Maupassant from the naturalists‖ (Steegmuller 127). Zola himself regarded ―Boule de Suif‖ as one important feature of the volume, but Maupassant was never at any time a member of the Naturalistic school. He and Flaubert were amused by Zola‘s pronunciamentos on the subject of Naturalism, the experimental novel and so forth. Maupassant clearly removes himself from Naturalism and argued that:

I have been thinking of our manifesto, and I feel I must make a complete confession of my literary faith. I believe no more in Naturalism than in Realism or Romanticism. In my view these words are absolutely devoid of meaning and merely lead to quarrels between 60

opposite temperaments…why limit oneself? The Naturalistic is as limited as the fantastic. (qtd. in Boyd 89)

Maupassant negated any division in Art and saw it as an indivisible whole. However, critics differed on this and Olin H. Moore in his article ―The Romanticism of Guy de Maupassant‖ very clearly depicts Maupassant as a perfect French Realist. He writes: ―If we are willing to allow to Maupassant the restricted field of his choosing—namely the present, not the past, the world of sense, not that of a spirit—it is necessary to admit that he was on the whole the most perfect of the French Realists‖ (133).

Maupassant primarily concentrated on the present with a deep insight into past. His sharp eyes observed minutely everything around him. He gazed at every colour and felt every odour. His preference was senses rather than the spirit, and Tolstoy, though admired Maupassant for his talent of description, found the spiritual side missing in his observation. Conrad also talked about how Maupassant dealt with the ―facts‖ observable to his eyes. He says that Maupassant has not always been properly understood because facts, and again facts have been his unique concern (Preface viii). He notes:

His facts are so perfectly rendered that, like the actualities of life itself, they demand from the reader that faculty of observation which is rare, the power of appreciation which is generally wanting in most of us who are guided mainly by empty phrases requiring no effort, demanding from us no qualities except a vague susceptibility to emotion. Nobody had ever gained the vast applause of a crowd by the simple and clear exposition of vital facts. (Conrad viii)

Maupassant was never a dealer in words, but his words are but ―polished gems‖ (Conrad ix). Hence, he has been called the master of the mot juste. For example, publications of his two posthumous volumes of short stories have proved this fact that he was by no means a dealer in words. He was more devoted to the visible world. Inspiration would come to him directly, honestly in the light of his day, instead of the tortuous, dark roads of meditation (Conrad x). In his Preface to Yvette and Other Stories, Conrad further introduces Maupassant primarily as an objective writer whose entire great virtues are based on ―self-denial‖ (Preface v). His simple description of objective reality is his art. His truly artistic devotion made Conrad declare how 61 difficult it is to pronounce a judgment upon the general tendency of an author. Conrad further says that Maupassant has shared, like the rest of us, his attitude towards our world which his senses were able to give him ‗because he is never dull‘ (vi). His determinism, barren of praise, blame, and consolation, has all the merit of his conscientious art. The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held. (Conrad vi).

This reminds of Maupassant‘s own words about the writer‘s special gift of perceiving external nature. According to him, writer‘s ―eye is like a suction-pump, absorbing everything; like a pickpocket‘s hand, always at work. Nothing escapes him. He is constantly collecting material; gathering up glances, gestures, intentions, everything that goes on in his presence - the slightest look, the least act, the merest trifle‖. (qtd. in Doumic 223)

As for as artistic beauty, in general, is concerned, both Flaubert and Maupassant appreciated it; however, it was Flaubert‘s supreme concern. Even if the form and idea were inextricably important to them, yet the former has been considered more important than the latter; ‗style‘ was something abstract and superior to the content clothing it. The unbreakable bond between sound and sense, between the mot euphonique (euphonious word) and mot juste was always there (Riddell 32). It was actually Flaubert who taught him that ―talent is a prolonged patience‖ at seeing what others tend not to see (Bloom 11). Maupassant, talking about the power of style and expression, writes that the true power of literature is not in what is said but in ‗how‘ something is said, that is, the method of preparation and presentation. The expression must accord with the idea and such agreement possesses a certain beauty which could not be perceived by the crowd. Both the writers believed that there must be harmony between word and idea, not only in a separate passage of a work but also in the whole work (Riddell 33). It is a sort of corollary to these two propositions in particular that critics have harmoniously advanced the assertion that Maupassant was the least Romantic of all the realists. Faguet presupposed that if Maupassant would have made a confession of his artistic faith, he would have said, ―Beauty is truth; truth is reality accurately observed, that is seen completely and distinctly, that is detached piece by piece from the complexity and confusion under which it exists in actual life, and so presented, piece by piece, to the reader. That is all‖ (622). Maupassant possesses, in 62 an eminent degree, ―two very simple faculties - a clear vision of forms and a ready intuition of what lies beneath them‖ (Doumic 225).

Yetta Blaze De Bury has called Maupassant the physiologist; the man of the amphitheatre. He acts like a surgeon, who ―carefully handles one nerve after another, measuring, studying, weighing, appreciating the influence of each upon the group, the reaction of the local phenomena upon the whole system‖ (De Bury 35) after cutting through the outer envelope. De Bury considered Maupassant as the artist as well as the scientist, while Madame de Lafayette is of the view that success came to him from ―what he is than from what he does‖ and ―he knows as much as he guesses‖ (qtd. in De Burry 35). Furthermore, Maupassant‘s art of writing has been explained by Joseph Conrad in following terms:

Maupassant‘s conception of his art is such as one would expect from a practical and resolute mind; but in the consummate simplicity of his technique it ceases to be perceptible. This is one of its greatest qualities, and like all the great virtues it is based primarily on self- denial. (25)

Conrad wants reason and emotion to be used together, because ―one couldn‘t depend upon reason alone, nor yet trust solely to one‘s emotions…emotions have their own unanswerable logic‖ (25). The perfect amalgamation of emotion and reason can be seen in the stories of Maupassant. His every story has emotional appeal enough to touch reader‘s heart and they are also simultaneously based on the logical universality of human nature or in Aristotelian terms ‗law of probability‘.

Maupassant in his well-known preface to Pierre et Jean expounds his theory of art or simply his opinions on the short story writing. He talks about the set rules for writing a novel, but the simple answer is that there are no such definite rules. As Rudyard Kipling has put it, ―there are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right!‖ (qtd. in Crewe P&J ix). Therefore, Maupassant declares an artist as a slave of his personality; he ―must write as he can, not as he would. Romantic or realist, he must follow his bent‖ (qtd. in Crewe ix). After analyzing some of Maupassant‘s stories, one can easily find ―the economy and clearness of description, the sharp characterization, the whimsical pathos and the scorching satire, [that] place this first-fruit of genius almost above criticism‖ (Crew xiv). 63

Although Maupassant has written six great novels, his artistic sublimity finds an outlet best in his short stories. His stories are filled with the dramatic expression, chiefly objective and saturated with local feelings. ―Their rigid truth is that of an affidavit; the shrewdness, the parsimony, the sordid brutality, the simplicity, the faithful devotion of his different types are recorded with unsparing frankness, and without the slightest attempt to point a moral‖ (Crew xvi).

Crewe has also discussed Maupassant‘s attitude towards womankind and his handling of sex-relations in his stories. He referred to some of his stories in which the subject is sinking into crudeness. However, the grossness of subject matter happens to be the only reason that stories like ―Boule de Suif,‖ ―La Maison Tellier,‖ ―L‘ Heritage‖ etc., came into existence. This is his artistic justification, if not ethical, for their existence. Further, Crew says: ―To Maupassant, the existence of sex was almost the prime and paramount fact in the world. It beset his mind with a perpetual appeal, and therefore inevitably strikes the dominant note in his books‖ (Crew xxiv).

The difference in tone (some are respectable and serious while others are bawdy and humorous) in most of Maupassant‘s short stories is due to their publication in two different newspapers: The Gaulois (1868-1929) and the Gil Blas (1879-1914). The two newspapers, different in their subject and readership, offer a striking difference among Maupassant‘s stories and other writings. In this context Donaldson-Evans says:

The readers of the somewhat snobbish Gaulois, acutely conscious of their social status and accustomed to a literary diet of elegant prose (for there were academicians among the contributors to this newspaper), would have frowned upon some of the pieces Maupassant submitted to the popular Gil Blas, whose more heterogeneous public fed hungrily upon the bawdy stories and the echos parisiens [Echos Paris] that were its specialty and the source of its success. (67)

In spite of all his artistic merit, he did not escape harsh criticism for obscenity in his works. ―This is not to say,‖ declared Conrad, ―Maupassant‘s austerity has never faltered; but the fact remains that no tempting demon has ever succeeded in hurling him down from his high, if narrow, pedestal‖ (Conrad vii). Like Sadat Hasan Manto, Maupassant too was accused of obscenity for some of his poems, and Flaubert defended him in 1880, the year in which his ―Boule de Suif‖, a story about the 64

Franco-Prussian war, was published in an anthology of Naturalist writing called Les Soirees De Medan by Emile Zola (Bloom 16).

Many critics, like Pierre Loti and Theodore de Banville have attacked Maupassant for depicting the low life. They went to the extent that one of them, in the Evenement, said: ―In ten years M. Guy de Maupassant, who has, I suppose, a literary conscience, will regret having put this repugnant book into circulation‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 153). Conversely, Zola wrote a favourable review, entitled as Alexis et Maupassant,which appeared on July 11. In it he defended Maupassant‘s choice of low life subject matter. According to Zola, Maupassant combined a ―breadth of shoulder‖ and a ―ruddy sturdiness‖ that were typically Norman and the style of a born writer. This book is healthy and certainly favourable to the younger generation. Further, Zola states:

There is no neurotic perversion, there is only a healthy, strong desire, free earthly love, life widely spread out in the sun…In sum, Maupassant continues in his new book to be the penetrating analyst, the solid writer, of Boul de Suif. His is certainly one of the sanest and healthiest temperaments of the younger generation. Now he must write a novel, a long work to show us his full capacity. (qtd. in Steegmuller 155)

Among the critics who censured Maupassant for adopting low subjects was a scholar, historian, critic and a friend of Flaubert named Hippolyte Taine. In a letter, he considered Maupassant a true and only successor of Flaubert and then praised him for his gift of ―natural fullness of conception, ability to see the whole and extreme abundance and richness of impressions, memories and psychological ideas; besides an accumulated store of half-realized perceptions that underlie and support every sentence, every word that you write‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 288). But then Taine advised Maupassant to increase the range of his observation. As Maupassant had presented peasants, the lower middle class, workers, students and prostitutes in his stories, Taine maintained that someday Maupassant would portray the cultivated classes, the upper bourgeoisie, engineers, physicians, professors, big industrialists and men of business too. According to Taine, ―this theory is certainly aristocratic, but it is based on experience, and I shall be happy when you devote your talent to men and 65 women who, thanks to their culture and fine feelings, are the honour and the strength of the country‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 288).

Maupassant has quoted this letter in two of his articles which appeared in the Gaulois and has strongly disagreed with Taine‘s comments. In response to it, he declared that ―The writer is and must remain the sole master, the sole judge, of what he feels capable of writing‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 289). He has written these two articles in response to the attacks by Albert Wolff and Francisque Sarcey. The former had labelled Maupassant as a ―sewer-man‖ and the latter had warned that, ―Let him beware! The public is beginning to have enough of these ugly pictures. It is not the magistrates by whom the author will be fined or imprisoned…‖ (qtd. in Steegmuller 289).

These attacks were baseless because the subjects of Maupassant‘s stories were never limited only to the low-life stratum of society. The horizon of his subjects was very vast. His stories cover all the aspects of reality in all colours and shades. His stories are, of course, about lower life; about bourgeois men and women, cuckolding each other; about peasants, their thinking about women and their living especially in Normandy; about prostitution, its evils, for which the structure of every society is responsible; how society hates prostitutes and is responsible for their grave condition; about the heart-wrenching tales of the hypocrisy of ‗respectability‘; and others about his own experience of domestic life, his mother‘s life and her humiliation at the hands of his father, besides others related to his hysteria and mental illness.

The multiplicity in his subjects, from the lowest to highest strata of society, is because he was raised in a chateau rented by his mother in one of the upper levels of a heavily stratified society. Although he was a member of the gentry, yet he had played in Etretat with the children of peasants and fisherfolk. Also, he had enjoyed the company of people like Bernard and Raymond, his sailors in Bel-Ami (Steegmuller 294). Thus the reason for portraying low life is that he knew it; it was not just the creation of his imagination, but a reality, which he had seen and lived, and also ―because it was picturesque and effective, no doubt in part because naturalism had made fashionable its literary use, and because it lent itself to his themes. But as far as his own life was concerned, we have seen how - apart from his need for sexual degradation - he sought his associates in increasingly exalted social strata, until Goncourt was impressed with his knowledge of chic” (Steegmuller 294). Maupassant 66 had chosen the subject (common people) because he felt its deep human note, in the depths of emotions that his sensitive soul had received the impressions from his childhood.

Maupassant replied to Sarcey about his views on literature in general and the freedom for the selection of subject matter in particular. He says that great writers like Victor Hugo, Gautier, Flaubert and many others, were rightly irritated by the claim of critics who impose a particular kind of literature upon the novelists. Maupassant says that ―An author is and must remain his own master, the sole judge of what he feels capable of writing‖ (qtd. in Boyd 116). Further, to him, a writer can choose any subject he wishes, then it is up to critics and readers to judge if the author has accomplished his task well or not. In his view, a civilization is a power and a respectable family background is of great importance in ones being honest, refined and educated. It is an aristocratic doctrine, but Maupassant has said it because of his experience. Literature never concentrates on an exact single observation, it breaths in multiple observations from different perspectives.

Maupassant‘s own letter written in his later years reveals his ideas clearly. He says that

I keep my life so secret that no one knows what it is. I am without illusions, a soldiery, a savage. I work—that is all I do—and in order to be isolated I live in so wandering a fashion that for whole months at a time only my mother knows where I am.

No one knows anything about me. In Paris I am considered an enigma, an unknown creature acquainted only with a few scientists (for I adore science) and with a few artists whom I admire, the friend of a few women - the most intelligent in the world, perhaps, but who think as I do - that is, who have a kind of disdain for life and for the world which causes us to look on at life with curiosity, detached from everything we love. (qtd. in Steegmuller 336)

Further, he writes

It was I who brought back the short story and the novelette into great vogue in France. My volumes have been translated all over the world 67

and sell in large quantities; for newspaper publication I am paid the highest rates ever known… (qtd. in Steegmuller 337)

Furthermore, Maupassant is the first French writer to bring a renaissance in the national taste for the short story and novelette. The twenty-one volumes of his writings made him immortal as a short story writer. His stories are and will be read vehemently by every bibliophile because he has depicted life realistically and truthfully.

Works Cited

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Donaldson-Evans, Mary. ―‗Nuit de Noel‘ and ‗Conte de Noel‘: Ironic Diptych in Maupassant‘s Work.‖ The French Review. 54.1 (October 1980): 66-67. Web. PDF File.

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Flemming, Leslie, eds. Another Lonely Voice: The Life and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto. Trans. Tahira Naqvi. Lahore: Vanguard, 1985. Print.

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Goyet, Florence. The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre. UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014.Web. http://www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781909254756

Harris, Frank. ―Guy de Maupassant.‖ Contemporary Portraits. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1915. Print.

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Matthews, Brander. The Philosophy of the Short-Story. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1991. Print.

Maupassant, Guy de, The Complete Works of Guy De Maupassant: Translations and Critical and Interpretative Essays. Ed. Sumichrast, Frederick C. de. New York: Brunswick Subscription Co, 1917. Print.

---. A Life: The Humble Truth. Trans. Roger Pearson. NY: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

---. Pierre and Jean. Trans. Crewe Robert. London: William Heinemann, 1923. Print.

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Surendran, K.V. ―Treatment of Women in Maupassant and Madhavikutty.‖ New Perspectives and Indian and Western fiction. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons. 2002. 115-25. Print.

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―A French Sensation‖. San Francisco Call.71.35. Web. 4 January 1892

CHAPTER III

The Life and Art of Manto

If you are not familiar with the age in which we live, read my stories. If you cannot bear my stories, it means that this age is unbearable.

~ Saadat Hasan Manto~ “Adab-e-Jadeed”

Outline

Set as a parallel to the previous chapter, this chapter talks about the literary background of the 1930s and 1940s in India. This period is conspicuous for the tremendous changes that occurred in Indian history in all respects, and particularly, in literature, as far as the Urdu short story is concerned. A brief introduction to Manto’s life reveals his ambiguous relationship with the Progressive Writers’ Movement and creation of the own unique world in his writings associated with the downtrodden sections of society, particularly the marginalized and oppressed prostitutes. This chapter also talks about Manto’s art of writing, style, his Western literary influence, and unconventional and the vast thematic reach of his short stories.

1. Introduction: A Literary Background

During the 1930s and 1940s in India, there was a tremendous change in every sphere of life, whether political, social, economic, or religious. In this „terrain of struggle‟ (Ahmad 40) the literary scene in India was changing in the same manner as Modernism became prevalent in Europe and lead to the rejection of conventional theories regarding art and literature. There were two radical changes in Urdu literature during the first half of twentieth-century. One was the absorption of European genres into Urdu literature and the second was the gradual change in the subject and content of literature from purely aesthetic to a functional or utilitarian view of literature. The genres which were strongly entrenched in Urdu fiction were the novel and the short story. These genres further helped in strengthening the view of literature as having a social as well as aesthetic purpose. Moreover, in fiction, it was the genre of novel rather than short story which became the centre of attention. 72

Dastan was the dominant mode of storytelling in Urdu literature in the earlier part of the 20th century. Based on the old tradition of narrating tales orally, these stories dealt mostly with the aristocratic characters and their encounters with magical elements. These tales were primarily designed to entertain along with providing moral education. After 1857, some realistic elements began to appear in Urdu literature, especially in fiction. The first example of the Urdu novel can be traced as far back as 1862, Khat-e taqdir (Letters of Fate) by Maulvi Karim ud-Din. After that, a collection of didactic stories, Mirat ul-urus (The Bride‟s Mirror) by Nazir Ahmad was published in 1869. This was followed by a famous picaresque novel Fasanah-e Azad (The Story of Azad) by Ratan Nath Sarshar which marked the actual beginning of romance novels in Urdu literature. Mirza Ruswa‟s, whom Annemarie Schimmel describes as “the founder of the realistic novel” (235)], Umra-o-Jan Ada, a true psychological novel, came in 1899. Premchand and Qurratulain Haider are the two names in the history of Urdu literature whose works Godan and Ag ka Darya (River of Fire) are considered masterpieces. Following them, the short story, for a variety of social and economic reasons, began to dominate Urdu literature. Premchand under the influence of Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Karl Marx, published his first collection of five short stories Soz-e Watan (Ardor of the Country) in 1909. His later stories became more realistic; for example, “Kafan”(Shroud), is a devastating portrayal of the psychology of poverty. “Thakur ka Kuan” (The Thakur‟s Well) and “Dudh ka Daam” (The Price of Milk) are filled with social irony. Moreover, during the 1930s a lot of translations of European literature, especially the writings of French and Russian realists were done in Urdu. This further enhanced the social, national and political fervour of Urdu writers. Under the Progressive Writers‟ Movement, Urdu fiction portrayed the common man, his problems and poverty. New experiments with style, characterization, narrative, theme, language etc. were also attempted by the Progressive writers. The oppression of women was one of the main concerns of the fiction of this period. Some of the best Progressive short story writers were Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Ismat Chugtai and Manto; they became the four pillars of short story writing. Among them, Manto was the most innovative, experimental, radical and revolutionary.

Munshi Premchand was virtually the first (who was influenced by Dickens, Tolstoy and later by Gandhi) to write integrated European style short stories in Urdu, 73 and he exemplified the purposive approach in literature. He would believe in its social reformation value as well (Flemming 23). His stories provide sympathetic portraits of the poor and downtrodden sections of society. With extreme realism, he explored such social problems as rural poverty and especially the oppression of women and the deleterious effects on human relations by caste barriers like untouchability. Later, his trend towards realistic reformist fiction was carried on by writers like Suhail Azimabadi and Ali Abas Husaini. In this context, Flemming has commented on the unique characteristics of the novel and short story in portraying realism:

However because of the unique ability of novels and short stories to portray realistically and to comment on social institutions, and because of the strong influence on Urdu writers of late nineteenth-century Russian writers, Urdu fiction writers of the century, up until about 1960, have been unequivocal in their understanding of literature as having some social purpose. (23)

Meanwhile, a group of young enthusiastic writers who were somewhat dissatisfied with Premchand‟s mildly reformist approach to fiction brought a new electrifying collection Angare (Live Coals). This was the most burning collection, published in 1933, by some young writers such as Sajjad Zahir, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmud uz-Zafar who were also associated with the Progressive Movement. This collection brought some revolutionary changes which have been described by Leslie A. Flemming in the following words:

In contrast to the balanced reformism of Premchand‟s stories, the stories in the Angare collection were consciously revolutionary, openly ridiculing religion and suggesting the oppressiveness of traditional social institutions, especially those related to women. (24)

At first this collection was harshly criticised for its innovatory form and extremist views, but later on people began to accept the changes. Some Indian students, who were studying abroad, including Mulk Raj Anand, Sajjad Zaheer and Jyotirmaya Ghosh, established The Progressive Writers‟ Association in 1935 in London. They believed that the aim of literature should change. It must deal with the fundamental problems of life -the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness, and political subjugation. So when they came back to India, Sajjad Zaheer along with Ahmed Ali organised the first meeting of Progressive Writers‟ 74

Association (PWA) in Lucknow in April 1936. Premchand presided over the meeting which was attended and supported by many prominent political leaders, academicians and writers. Popularly known as The Progressive Movement, it soon came into its full shape. It began to influence both the form and content of the entire Urdu literary canon which was until then struggling between imaginary conjectures and authoritative didacticism. This association also founded an Urdu journal, Naya Adab which became the leading vehicle for progressive writing in Urdu. The two fundamental planks on which the movement was based on were “nationalism and view of literature as a force for social uplift in India” (Flemming 25). The Progressive Movement was defined in the All India Manifesto, issued in Lucknow in 1936, as: “We want the new literature of India to make its subject the fundamental problems of our life. These are the problems of hunger, poverty, social backwardness and slavery” (qtd. in Flemming 25). Further, in this perspective Hasrat Mohani stated that:

Our literature… should support and defend workers, peasants and all oppressed people. In it the joys and sorrows of the people, their best desires and wishes should be expressed in such a way as to increase their revolutionary power and allow them, once they are united and organized, to be successful in their strivings (qtd. in Flemming 25).

Similarly, the most inclusive and fundamental aim of Progressive literature is given a clear expression in the leading editorial of the first issue of Naya Adab, published in April 1939:

In our opinion, progressive literature is that literature which looks at the realities of life, reflects them, investigates them and leads the way towards a new and better life, but it is not only the herald and pulse- taker of the tumult and commotion of life, it does not flow only with the changing waves of the surfaces, but, rather, having gone to the depths of life, flows with those silent and sweet currents which flow beneath the surface. (qtd. in Flemming 25).

2. Progressive Writers’ Movement and Manto: An Ambiguous Relation

Progressive Writers‟ Movement was a new and innovative movement in the sphere of art and literature that began in 1936. Parvaiz Shaharyar has considered the publication of Angaray in 1932 as a driving force behind it because after Sozi-e- Watan it was the first short story collection which expressed its concern, in an 75 intellectual way, against the solidification of customary and traditional rules in the society (17). For two decades the Progressive Movement was at its zenith and despite its decline after 1950, it had already changed the whole course of Urdu literature, its form and content along with the development of some new genres. It was most certainly an influential force in Manto‟s writing career. As a matter of fact, the period in which Manto wrote was imbued with the spirit of Progressive Movement. The characters created by Premchand were very simple, wearing khadi and a hammer and sickle in their hands. Manto accompanied these caravans for some time but ultimately reached a world as yet un-approached. He revolted through his art and produced stories which pictured the real society. Mohammad Askari is of the view that these stories were not written out of nothing, but rather they are the product of the interior significance of that particular age. The statement was a generalization of the whole period of the Progressive Movement. However, if one has to understand the specialities of Manto‟s art, considering only the age would not work well, his personality and ideas together with the spirit of the period should be kept in view.

Sajjad Zaheer, one of the leading figures of the movement, praised Manto for some of his stories, but declared him reactionary. According to Zaheer, “a few of his stories are counted among the best stories of our literature, but it is also true that some of his stories are bad. Some are even reactionary…” (qtd. in Flemming 28). About Manto‟s most discussed story “Bu” (Odour) Zaheer remarked:

I once said to Manto myself that his story “Bu” was a very painful and stupid story, because the portrayal of the sexual perversions of a satisfied member of the middle class, no matter how much reality it is based on, is a waste of the writer‟s and reader‟s time, and, in fact, it is as much an expression of escape from the most important demands of life as old fashioned reactionism. (qtd. in Flemming 28)

Similarly, Ali Sardar Jafri first admired Manto‟s stories. He wrote an introduction to Manto‟s short story collection Chughud, considered his story “Khol Do” (Open It) a masterpiece, but later on he radically altered his view about Manto. He praised progressive literature for its realism and distinguished between portrayals of what he considered healthy and sick, chaste and dirty, beautiful and ugly love. In contrast to Krishan Chander, Majaz and Faiz, he claimed Manto‟s “Bu” (Odour) and N. M. Rashid‟s “Intiqam” (Revenge) as sick, wounded, and reactionary pieces (qtd. in 76

Flemming 28). Other critics also accused Manto of exploiting the sexual content. For example, an academic critic Rashid Ahmad Siddiqui says, “Manto takes pleasure in describing a woman. He decorates the store of his writings with a woman‟s weakness and helplessness” (qtd. in Flemming 29).

Although Manto was associated with the Progressive Movement at first, he began to oppose and criticize it later on. He even accused the movement of branding his post-partition volume Siyah Haashiye (Black Margins) as reactionary. This was primarily because of Manto‟s association with Muhammad Hasan Askari, an outspoken opponent of the movement. Manto concluded his introduction to Chughud by saying, “Finally, I want to say that I don‟t care at all about the „Progressivism‟, but the back and forth leaps of famous Progressive hurt a lot” (192). He then relinquished his relation with every movement or -ism and declared:

If anyone should ask me what group I am in, I will say that I am alone, in every respect alone. I will give up writing the day my twin is born, although I do not object if some group is proud to include my name on its list. (qtd. in Tufail 22)

The ambiguous issue regarding the Sadat Hasan Manto‟s association and relation with the Progressive Moment is whether he was a progressive or not. Critics have fiercely debated and discussed this issue, but the conclusions are vague and ambivalent. In this context, there are two opposite views: some critics accept him as a progressive while most of them contradict this. The ambiguous relationship of Manto with the Progressive Writers‟ Association is illustrated by Lesli A. Flemming thus: “Manto sympathized and agreed with the principles of the Progressive Writers Movement, but that in his best stories he accomplished the immensely difficult task of both reflecting those principles and preserving the aesthetic integrity of his short stories” (Preface 1). After an exhaustive reading of Manto‟s short stories, one comes across a lot of similarities and closeness with the principles that are associated with progressive literature (especially short stories). For example, the „common man‟ who is living in the progressive stories, also breathes in the stories of Manto. Manto‟s stories deal with common life and he has also represented those themes which were the backbone of Progressive Movement. In this respect, Manto can be called a Progressive Writer. But his stories have obvious differences too that make us hesitate in calling him a progressive. Further, Aslam Jamsheeduri in “Kya Manto Tarqi 77

Pasand tha” says that Manto wrote his short stories fundamentally as an expression of his art and his characters are living their natural lives, since Manto has not molded and shaped them for some specific purpose, as the progressive stories sacrifice themselves for some definite aim (178). Manto‟s relation with the Progressive Movement is as ambivalent as Eliot‟s and Richard‟s with the New Criticism. “To say Manto was not progressive,” adds Jamsheedpuri, “could not be absolutely true; yes, Manto was only progressive, this also would not be totally right…we find some influence of progressiveness, however, contrary to that, Manto‟s stories definitely became the torch bearer for the progressive stories and influenced deeply the stories that came later on” (Jamseedpuri 178, Self trans.).

3. Life and Writings

Manto is considered “the most controversial figure of the Urdu short story” (Wadhawan 7). According to Leslie A. Flemming, he was “egotistical, extremely individualistic, argumentative and impulsive” (Flemming 1). Jagdish Chander Wadhawan says in his influential biography of Manto entitled Manto Naama that Manto was an enigma in his lifetime and also after his death. Though Manto had been praised in his lifetime by many people, the number of his detractors was not less. If a chosen few saw in him the virtues of an angel, many viewed him a Satan. Wadhawan struggled for two and half years to unveil the mystery of Manto who went to extremes, transcending every limit. “Nobody looked at him as a „human being‟ who was a blend of an angel and devil, an admixture of the good and the bad” (Wadhawan 8).

Like Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru and Allama Iqbal, Manto‟s family originally belonged to a Kashmiri Brahmin background. He was proud of his Kashmiri origin and often alluded to this fact. Once he even mentioned it to Pandit Nehru in a letter:

I am your Pandit brother. There is one thing common between us. You are a Kashmiri and so am I. You are a Nehru. I am a Manto… Being a Kashmiri, Kashmir has a magnetic pull for you. This is true of every Kashmiri even if he has not been in Kashmir. I have been only up to Banihal. I am familiar with Kud, Batot, Kishtwar. (qtd. in Wadhawan 14)

The word „Manto‟ was unusual in the Urdu language. He would be often questioned about the origin of the „Manto‟, and it sometimes confused him too. Wadhawan has 78 quoted the words of Sadat Hasan Manto in which he has traced the origin of „Manto‟ thus:

There are many castes in the Kashmir Valley which come under the category of „Aal‟. For instance, Nehru, Sapru, Kuchlu, etc. „Mant‟ in the Kashmiri language stands for weight used for measurement. Our ancestors were fabulously rich and used to weight silver and gold on the weighting scales used for measuring grains… (15).

According to Wadhawan, soon „Manto‟ became a byword in the Urdu literary field. People forgot Sadat Hasan in his lifetime but „Manto‟ remained alive.

Sadat Hasan Manto was born on 11 May 1912 in Samrala, a small town, 22 miles away from Ludhiana. His ancestors came from Kashmir where they had been living for centuries. It was in the latter half of the 18th century or in the beginning of 19th century that his forefathers migrated to Punjab concerning their business of Pashmina shawls (high-class refined woollen cloth). Manto‟s grandfather, Khawaja Jamaluddin made Amritsar his home. Manto was the son of Jamaluddin‟s youngest son, Moulvi Ghulam Hasan who was a very stern and short-tempered man. The bitter memories cast a shadow over Manto‟s whole life. The father‟s terror made Manto find solace and comfort only in his mother. She too was fond of him and later she arranged his marriage with Safia Begum. It is also said, for instance, in Manto and Bedi: Taqabli Muqabla (Manto and Bedi: A Comparative Study) by Dr. Kehkasha‟n Parveen, that Manto had an unusual relationship with his mother which Sigmund Freud called mother fixation (18). However, this interpretation could not be validated from any of his writings or incidents in Manto‟s life.

Manto had a fascination for the unconventional. He was stubborn and rebellious by nature. While in high school, he was fond of reading those books which his teachers considered objectionable and were regarded as taboo. His unique way of living made him the centre of attention. He failed in matriculation and later passed it in the third attempt, that too with a third division. The most astonishing fact is that the subject in which he failed was none other than Urdu. He lost interest in his studies and began to loaf around the streets of Amritsar, gambling day and night. It was that period in Manto‟s life in which he was restless. Wadhawan has also noted that Manto‟s character was an opposition for opposition‟s sake. He was stubborn in nature and he would always assert his individuality (35). The best description of his short- 79 tempered and mercurial nature can be seen in his own pen-sketch about himself: “One can be indulgent to every trait of his but his volcanic temper. When aroused, he behaves like a beast. But only for a few minutes. But in these few minutes, it seems as if all hell has been let loose” (qtd. in Wadhawan 36). Many critics have pointed out that Manto was so obstinate that they felt short story writing was only a means to express it. The society in which he first opened his eyes and then grew up in played an important role in making him obstinate and stubborn. Manto was the child of his father‟s second wife. His elder brothers, like his father, treated him poorly and a sensitive boy like Manto could not get the love and affection of his family that was rightfully his. The eventual result was that he grew up as a man with a stubborn and rebellious nature.

Manto and his friend, Sayed Qureshi, could not pay attention to their studies, with the result that they also failed in the FA examination. Later on, both of them went to Aligarh Muslim University which in those days was considered the nursery of art and literature. Besides Manto‟s mentor Bari Sahab, Aligarh Muslim University had produced many luminaries such as Asrar-ul-Haq Majaz, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Moin Ahsan Jazbi, Shahid Latif and Ali Sardar Jafri. It was during Manto‟s stay at the University that unfortunately his health began to deteriorate. He went to Delhi for treatment and there he came to know that he was suffering from tuberculosis. Doctors advised him to go to some sanative place so that the change of air would recuperate him. His elder sister Iqbal Begum gave him money and he went to Batot, a well- known health resort in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. He stayed there for three months and fell in love with a Kashmiri shepherd girl while roaming in the bracing climate of Batot, Kishtwar and Banihal in search of health and healing.

After coming back to Amritsar, Manto resumed his struggle for a livelihood by joining literary and non-literary magazines one after another. At last, he joined All India Radio in 1941 as a scriptwriter on a salary of rupees 150. This period proved very productive in terms of his literary production. In only one and a half year he wrote more than 100 plays which were broadcasted on the radio. In September 1942 he left Delhi for Bombay to join the film industry. He worked with various film companies such as Imperial Film Company, Film City, Saroj Movietone, Hindustan Cinetone etc. In June/July 1943 Manto joined Filmistan, the well-known film company, as a story writer, on a salary of rupees three hundred, which later was raised 80 to rupees five hundred. During this time Manto‟s economic condition became very good. But everything was shattered by the partition of India. Manto decided to leave Bombay for Pakistan because he thought Pakistan would provide him with a number of opportunities for livelihood. Therefore, Manto left for Pakistan with bag and baggage. One of the reasons for his sudden migration was that the story which he had written under great mental stress for the legendary actor Ashok Kumar, was rejected while Ismat Chughtai‟s story “Ziddi” was accepted. He felt terribly insulted. Nazir Ajmeri‟s story was also accepted in preference over his. Therefore, he migrated in desperation. He lost everything - his fortune in Bombay, his circle of friends including prominent figures such as Krishan Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Upendra Nath Ashk, Ismat Chughtai, Kawaja Ahmad Abbas, etc.

On 8th January 1948, Manto reached Lahore via Karachi. During those days he was suffering from mental depression. The scene in Lahore was totally different from Bombay. The harsh reality of the Partition stood mountain-like before him. Manto was wandering unsettled in a great trauma. He once again tried to hold his pen and wrote humorous essays such as “Various Kinds of Noses” and “Writing on the Walls for Imroz”. His other articles such as “Sawal Paida Hota Hai” (The Question Arises) and “Sawere Jo Kal Ankh Meri Khuli” were collected in a volume Talkh, Tursh aur Shireen (Bitter, Acrimonious, and Sweet) (Wadhawan 29).

Manto, however, became a literary untouchable both in the eyes of the government and the so-called progressive writers. They called him a reactionary and a pornographer. “Manto had gone to Pakistan in the hope of finding himself in greener pastures. But it turned out to be an arid waste for him” (Wadhawan 30). However, the last years of Manto‟s life which he spent in Pakistan proved very productive from the literary point of view. Since the film industry was almost non-existent in Pakistan, Manto had to entirely depend upon creative writing for a living. Therefore, he wrote fast and wrote until the last days of his age.

Jagdish Chander Wadhawan has pointed out three phases of Sadat Hasan Manto as far as his writing career is concerned. In the first phase, there are stories that he wrote from 1934 to 1937, and most of these stories were published in Khalq, Saqi and the Aligarh Magazine. He wrote these stories during his stay in Amritsar, Lahore and Aligarh. Atish Pare is the name of the collection of these stories published in January 1936. This collection includes “Khooni Thook,” “Inquilab Pasand,” “Ji Ava 81

Saheb,” “Tamasha,” “Taqqat Ka Imtihan,” “Diwana Shair,” “Chori” etc. The last story is based on one of the Victor Hugo‟s poems (Wadhawan 151).

In this collection, Manto has paid a special attention to the construction of stories, particularly the endings. In an innovative attempt, he made the ending very moving by introducing the element of dramatic disclosure in his stories. Another prominent feature of Manto‟s art is the brevity and terseness of his stories. In the whole of Urdu fiction, the position of Manto is unique when we talk about his art of conciseness. His stories are so lucid but razor-edged that one can neither find any wastage of words nor any superfluous sentence. “Every sentence of his story has a definite purpose,” says Wadhawan (159-60). Furthermore, Wadhawan says that these stories were naturally produced by Manto with an outstanding feature. He had not made any conscious effort in achieving his ends as far as the short story writing is concerned. But these stories have been criticized as the narration and the scenic effects have not come off so well. Proper assimilation is another fault in these stories for which he is criticized. Moreover, these stories are devoid of the element of sex which later became his main concern (151).

The second phase encompassed a period of eleven years, from 1937 to January 1948. These years proved very fruitful as for as his short stories and articles are concerned. On account of blossoming talent and artistic maturity, his name began to be counted with the names of some eminent writes of the period like Krishan Chander, Upendra Nath Ashk, Devendra Satyarathi and N. M. Rashid. The earlier stories of this period which have some romantic colour in them are “Begu,” “Na Makammal Tehrir,” “Lalteen,” “Misri Ki Dali,” “Mausam Ki Shararat,” “Bhanjh,” “Shy Shum Chuhedan,” “Ghusalkhana,” “Shannahe” and “Us Ka Pati”. There are some other stories which have the strains of the Progressive spirit; these include “Naya Qanoon,” “Shughul” and “Naara”. This period also witnessed some of his so- called objectionable stories, for example, “Kali Shalwar,” “Dhuan” and “Bu”. Also, some masterpieces which enhanced Manto‟s reputation are “Hatak” and “Khushiya”. His most individualistic story “Babu Gopinath” based on the art of characterization too belongs to the same period. Other stories include “Darpok,” “Tarraqi Pasand,” “Chughad,” “Parhiye Kalma,” “Sooraj kay Liye,” “Das Rupaye,” and “Mantar”. Apart from this, various other collections were published during this period: Manto Ke Afsane (1940), Dhuan (1941), Afsane Aur Dramay (1943) and Lazzat-e-Sang 82

(1947). Manto‟s five other collections of his plays, stories and articles are Aao (1940), Janazey (1942), Teen Aurtein, Manto kay Mazameen, Afsane aur Dramay (1942)

Manto‟s third phase includes a period from January 1948 to 1955, from his migration to Pakistan to his death. Manto unmasked the hypocrisy and human irrationality in his collection of vignettes, based on the partition riots namely Siya Hasheye. This period produced immortal stories on the subject of the freedom movement and riots like “1919 Ki Ek Baat,” “Ram Khilawan,” “Sahai” and “Mozil” and his two outstanding stories related to the Kashmir war are “Akhri Salute” and “Titwal Ka Kutta”. The published collections of this period are Chughad (1948), Khali Botlen, Khali Dabbey (1950), Badshahat Ka Khatma (1954), Beghar Ijazat (1955), Burque (1955) and Ratti, Masha, Tola (1956). His collections of stories published posthumously are Namrood Ki Khudai, Sarkandon Ke Peechey, Phunde, Thanda Gosht, Chashme Rozan, Gulab Ke Phool, Majzoob Ke Bar.

Besides being the master of short story writing, Manto also wrote about a hundred essays and articles. Manto has no equal in Pen-Sketches. His two volumes of sketches are considered a unique contribution to the Urdu literature. “Mera Saheb,” “Murli Ki Dhun,” “Bari Saheb,” “Babu Rao Patel,” “Nargis” and more specifically his autobiographical sketch are his immortal contributions to Urdu literature. If he would have written these sketches only, his fame would not have been less. Manto was a professional writer. He would write on anything or any subject given to him. His earlier essays talk about Communism, Socialism, Marxism, revolution, fighting for freedom, Jallianwalla Bagh etc.; while his later essays talk about commotion, tumult, riots, politics, Partition, Kashmir, American imperialism, social setup, concept of religious society, the dominance of religious clerics on society, their limited point of view, equality and freedom of women, sexuality in literature, problems related to obscenity and nudity and prostitutes in our society and problems associated with them.

Numerous essays, articles and other books have been written on Manto, discussing his art and his personality simultaneously. Manto‟s life and his art together have been discussed so much that they have become inseparable. Just by a glancing at the title of an article “Sadat Hasan Manto: Fan aur Shakhsiyat” (Sadat Hasan Manto: Art and Personality) by Salman Abdul Samad, one can assume that Manto‟s art is somewhere veiled in his personality. Similarly, Mohammad Aslam Parvaiz in his 83 article “Manto ki Drama Nigari” (Manto as a Dramatist) has pointed out that the art of Manto cannot be separated from his personality. Both his art and personality should be read and be reviewed together in order to get meaning. Their relation is like a nail with skin. “Manto as an artist and Manto as a man were not very different from each other; they were perhaps one and the same” (Wadhawan 161). But his world of art centres on another thing which is equally important and that is „conflict‟. This conflict can be found not only is in his works but also in his personality which Manto has mentioned in his autobiographical sketch as: “Manto‟s short story writing is the result of the contradiction of two opposite elements. His father, May Allah forgive him, was an ill-tempered man and his mother, most kind-hearted” (qtd. in Parvaiz 14, Self trans.). These contradictory elements in Manto act like positive and negative currents of electricity. Further, in his autobiographical pen-sketch “Sadat Hasan Manto,” Manto claims that „Manto‟ would continue to live on even if people forget Sadat Hasan. He stated, “It is possible that Sadat Hasan may soon die but Manto may still live on”. Sadat Hasan passed away on 18th January 1955, but Manto still lives on.

4. Ideas and Style of Writing According to Manto, literature is “the pulse of a nation, a community which gives news about the nation, the community to which it belongs, its health, its illness” (qtd. in Tamiri 32). According to him, one should read the book of life and act objectively to examine the physical and moral divisions of society in a detached manner, free from any prejudice, without passing any judgments. Manto also says, “We diagnose disease but not run a clinic…” (qtd. in Tamiri 32). Krishan Chander once said about Manto that “he is a harsh surgeon who does not even give chloroform to his patients” (qtd. in Tamiri 32). This shows the disillusionment of Manto towards the society he lived in; he attacked its hypocrisy and unwillingness in lending a hand to the oppressed. He unveiled the dark face of the society which treated the downtrodden as beasts. He was imagining a radical change in which we could be better humans. Mohd Khalid Akhter, a great humorist, pays an accolade to Manto by saying, “…In prose that was pure as a pearl, he [Manto] continued to prick our dead conscience, shocking us out of our self-absorption, our complacency. He made us see ourselves in his shimmering mirror as we really were. He forced us to think that we could be better human beings...” (qtd. in Tamiri 33). Manto was sympathetic towards the marginalized people from the core of his heart. His chose those female 84 protagonists for his stories who were sexually ravaged, morally destroyed and intellectually paralyzed. To Manto, “A human being is just a human being first and last” (qtd. in Tamiri 33). He was even more sympathizing with those people whom the so-called upright people would call as dirty. When critics called his stories as dirty, his only answer was, “If you find my stories dirty, see the society you are living in is dirty. In my stories, I have only exposed the truth” (qtd. in Tamiri 33). Manto believed that people will continue to talk about the evil unless it is not eradicated from the society. To him “the whorehouse is itself a corpse which society carries on its shoulders. Until society buries it somewhere, there will be discussion about it…” (qtd. in Tamiri 33).

Manto did not directly propound any philosophy of values about life but it is only through the deep and close reading of his fictional writings that one could perceive his ideas or vision of life. “These values and concepts include—frankness, honesty, the discrepancy between appearance and reality, the validity of sex in life, the ethics of human relations, and the ambiguous nature of life” (Asaduddin, Introduction BM 11). Manto‟s ideas and concepts of humanity shine in his fictional writings. Most of the critics have appreciated his sympathetic approach especially towards the downtrodden and marginalized people. Moreover, Manto created characters that are neither pure angels nor absolute devils; they are human with common blood and soul in vulnerable flesh. In this regard, Asaduddin quotes Mumtaz Shireen thus:

Manto is not interested in hallowed angels. Manto the writer does not have much to do with pure and innocent angels who can never possibly commit sin. Manto likes men who dare to commit sin. Manto‟s human being is neither an angel nor a devil. He is an earthling, a creature of the flesh and blood who has the potentiality of Original Sin, mischief, murder and mayhem. But God had ordered angels to pay obeisance to him. (11)

As far as Manto‟s religion is concerned, he is more religious than others, but his religion is humanism and so is the subject of his stories. Therefore, he never distinguishes between humans on the basis of their caste, creed and religion. This reflects his profound insight and vision. His heroes and heroines belong to different sects and religions of the world and yet they are living under the same umbrella of 85 humanism. For example, Sugandhi of “Hatak” (Spurned) and Gopinath of his story “Babu Gopinath” are Hindus, and Sultana of “Kali Shalwar” (Black Shalwar) is Muslim, while the central character of “Toba Tek Singh” is a Sikh. His other immortal characters such as Mozil and Mummy, also, belong to different religions; the former is a Jew while the latter is a Christian. Moreover, there are some other characters who have an affinity with all religions. The woman in “Sarak Ke Kinare” (On the Roadside), for example, is the primaeval daughter of Eve having no religious label. To use the words of Wadhawan, his stories make up “a microcosm of the whole of India inhabited by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians…Religion has no special significance. His characters are first and foremost humans. They don‟t carry any distinctive religious label” (121). Manto‟s own words illustrate his concept of religion as humanism thus:

Manto was a friend of „man‟. He believed in humanism, which he professed to be his religion, for it imparted meaning to life. He stood for the downtrodden and voiced their statements.

I am poor because my country is poor. Somehow I manage to get two meals a day. But there are my brethren who are deprived even of this meagre fare. The segment of the country‟s population which rides in Buicks and Packards is not of my country. My country is that in which poor people like me and those who are worse off than me live. (qtd. in Wadhawan 123)

It is true, as he himself described in his own pen-sketch, that Manto has been accused as a vulgar and non-religious person, and to some extent, he confirms to this category. It is because he has written stories on those subjects which were regarded as objectionable and taboo. Manto was open, clear, outspoken, direct, honest and completely free of hypocrisy. He ironically described himself by an English word “fraud”, though he was not in the least close to it, and “in fact, Manto disliked pretence; to Manto, outer and inner were one, and therefore he didn‟t hem and haw. What he had to say he said clearly” (qtd. in Flemming 19). Manto himself wrote that “In me is the capacity of a man, there are unlimited weaknesses. Thus I am always afraid that these weaknesses will cause hatred pain because of these very weaknesses” (qtd. in Flemming 20). 86

Humanism was the only religion that Manto followed and his love for collective humanity dribbles from every piece of his writing. His most famous description of humanism is, “Don‟t say one lakh Hindus and one lakh Muslims have died; say two lakh human beings have died” (Manto, NV 22), the often-quoted line in the Urdu literature. Manto begins his famous story “Sahai” with this well-known line in which he communicates the spirit of humanism. At the very beginning, the story catches our attention when Manto stresses on defining all the people as human, without grouping them into any particular religion or sect. To him, it does not matter whether one is Hindu or Muslim, rather he looks at everyone as a human being. He further says that the real tragedy is not that two lakh humans are dead, but the reason for which they killed themselves - to wipe out each other‟s religion. However, religion cannot be eradicated from the hearts; “only fools believe that they can hunt down religions with guns” (Manto, NV 22).

This story is based on a real incident that happened in Manto‟s own life. It has been noted by Waris Alvi in his book Sadat Hasan Manto. He says that Manto and Sham were close friends. During the partition people started killing each in the name of religion. One day, just as Mumtaz asked Jugal in the story, Manto asked Sham, “I am a Muslim, don‟t you in your heart wish to kill me”. Sham replied very seriously, “Not this time, but I could have killed you when I was listening to the stories of tyranny inflicted by Muslims” (qtd. in Alvi 22). Manto was not expecting an answer like the one he received from one of his dearest friends. It bruised his heart and later he said that it was only that time that he comprehended the entire psychological context behind the riots and commotions, in which thousands of innocent Hindus and Muslims get killed.

When Jugal, Mumtaz‟s own friend, said to him that “I have been thinking, you know, that I just might kill you” (Manto, NV 23), he was not conscious of what he was actually saying. This was the fever of the prevailing riots that made him act so. The justification for the above mentioned statement would be Mumtaz‟s answer to Jugal:

„You would have regretted it more had you killed me,‟ Mumtaz sounded philosophical. „But only if you considered that you had killed Mumtaz, a Muslim, not a friend but human being. If he was wicked, you didn‟t destroy his wickedness. If he was Muslim; you didn‟t 87

destroy his Muslim-ness, but only the living proof of his being. If his corpse had fallen in the hands of Muslims, there would have been one more grave in some graveyard but one human being less in this world‟… At that moment I believed that religion, faith, belief— whatever they might be—resided in our souls, not in our bodies. They could not be destroyed by knives and swords and guns. (Manto, NV 25)

To Manto, religion is something that gives us “a certain special aura that truly makes us human” (Manto NV 26). It has nothing to do with one‟s profession or anything else. Mumtaz was surprised how a man who traded in women could have possessed such a pristine soul. He says, “I am surprised that for most people he was a mere mortal. In fact, I am more surprised that for most people he was just a pimp, a man who traded in women, but his soul was pristine” (Manto NV 26). This man was Sahai. He too might have some flaws in his character but in Mumtaz‟s eyes, he was the best man he had ever known. Sahai kept Sultana‟s things safe. She was one of his traded girls and even till his last breath, he protected her things which cost him his life. Even if Sultana was a Muslim and he himself a Hindu, the spirit of humanism in him broke all the religious boundaries between the two. Lastly, Jugal said, “I wish I was Sahay‟s spirit” (Manto NV 29).

Thus this story clearly proves the fact that the religion of Sadat Hasan Manto did not define his identity. “His identity didn‟t come from religion and it came only partially from geography” (Patel vii). He wrote about the subjects of different cultures, different geographical locations, and of different people. His short stories can hardly be compared with his contemporaries, which shows us his real talent and his art, and “it made him the Maupassant of India” (Patel viii). As a believer in humanism, Manto wanted equality and harmony in a society without the religion which creates classes, sections and boundaries among people. Manto‟s stories are a testimony to the fact that he is ironical and satirizes those people who have made religion their identity and which tend to change in accordance with the external turbulence. The words of Professor Mohammad Asim Siddiqui illustrate this by maintaining that:

In fact, Manto‟s vision of oneness is expressed through his ironical handling of the differences between different communities. His stories are peopled with characters from different religions. In their everyday 88

life, there is not much to differentiate. In their sexuality and romance, they express themselves in similar manner. Their religious identity overrides other identities only during time of external turbulence. Thus, in his stories like „Gurumukh Singh ki Wasiyat‟, „Sahay‟. „Sharifan‟ or even „Thanda Gosht‟, Manto presents characters who probably discover their religious identity by external circumstances. (22)

Most of the Manto‟s stories propound the same message of humanism and try to highlight the social inequalities prevailing at the different levels. His sensitivity towards these issues pushed him to write about them, and „writing‟ to him was an addiction; it was to him like all other basic needs as eating and drinking. He himself argued that “The most important reason is that I‟m addicted to writing, just as I am to drinking. When I don‟t write, it feels like I am unclothed, like I haven‟t had a bath like I haven‟t had my first drink” (Manto, WIW 2). Thus, it is only his pen that transforms him from Sadat Hasan to Manto. Manto once remarked that “when he was not holding his pen he was merely Sadat Hasan but when he held the pen in his hand he was transformed into Manto. As soon as he became Manto, his pen sprouted wings” (qtd. in Wadhawan 155). It was his pen that spontaneously forced him to write. He had to put very little effort to produce stories. Manto himself affirms the fact that “he did not write the story, rather the story wrote him” (qtd. in Wadhawan 156). Writing to him was as necessary as eating or sleeping or smoking or drinking.

In literature time and again importance has been given to the way things are presented rather than what is presented. For an artist, the craft and technique are essential in order to achieve his aim. As far as Manto is concerned, both narration and subject matter are equally important. He has focused equally on both the techniques of narration and the subject (the social truth) that forces him to write. The craft of presenting or narrating, which made Manto a successful writer, has been appreciated by many critics. In the words of Hasan Masna: “Manto is the only writer in Urdu literature who gives the same importance to both art and aim; it is only through his craft and technique that he has achieved victory on the both” (113).

Manto employed the neutral third person narrator in many of his stories. It helped him to provide a detailed depiction of the inner emotional states of characters. Sometimes that emotional state of mind is also conveyed through internal 89 monologues. He has also used a first person narrator-observer called „Manto,‟ sharing many of the author‟s personal characteristics, whom we may call the „Manto persona‟. The term „Manto persona‟ was coined by Leslie A. Flemming and it refers specifically to the narrator who gives an illusion of being the „real author‟. In many stories of his collection Chughd and especially in the story “Banjh,” Manto persona appears as a fully developed character, with his own personality and power to shape our understanding of the events he narrates. He shares a lot of personal characteristics with the author Manto, for example, his name, his profession as a film-writer and short story writer. He also smokes and drinks, and his wife disapproves of his associates. This technique of narrating stories by the narrator-observer made them more realistic and true. Sometimes he is wrong in his perceptions, for example, in his initial misapprehension of Babu Gopi Nath as a fool or in his insensitivity to the meaning of the arrangements for Zeenat‟s wedding.

Manto wrote very smoothly, elegantly and lucidly. The result was that he could express his feeling and emotions with a great delicacy. He used familiar and known words to avoid circumlocution, ambiguity and vagueness. Wadhawan quoted the famous words of Krishan Chander on Manto‟s unique style that nobody could copy. He says:

Very soon Manto was able to evolve a style of his own. You can come across writers who can successfully [copy] the style of Abbas, Ashk, Ismat and Krishan Chander. But nobody has been able to copy Manto‟s and to a lesser extent Bedi‟s style. There is only one Manto in Urdu. (162)

As far as the style and expression in Manto‟s short stories is concerned, the first thing that strikes readers is that “Manto knew the way of expressing the most ordinary and simple thing in the most extraordinary and unusual way” (Azeem 32). He expresses the intense passions and feelings in very simple words and makes the sentences more meaningful and terse. Only he could render an unimportant sentence into an important one. The depth of meanings and details are the characteristics of his style. Further,

Manto was an artist and there is nothing ordinary and diminutive to any artist. The seemingly ordinary and small things in other eyes can be of extraordinary effect, if an artist has a true creative power of 90

looking at things, which was present in Manto par excellence. (Azeem 64)

Manto knew the art of giving life to ordinary things by the single touch of his pen. Manto‟s art is unravelling and unique. In his whole artistic life, Manto as a true artist concentrated on a single issue in a story which would have a special effect on the readers. Syed Waqar Azeem praises Manto‟s art, particularly his style of introducing his stories (beginning of a story) which often has a profound effect on readers. Thus a successive chain of events flows until the very ending of the story. These linked parts of the chain of events do not let the readers leave the story without finishing it. With a catching and suspenseful beginning, Manto like Maupassant ends his stories in a most shocking way. Some stories end up in a dramatic way, while others, without giving any conclusion are open-ended, thus to leave the readers in wonder. Manto completes his artistic chain with the ending and “he always tried to link between passion, psychology and artistic relations, and strengthened this relationship with the help of his story endings” (Azeem 23, Self trans.). On the whole, Manto‟s style can be summed up as a powerful narration, delicacy of expression, and a grip over technical terms, slangs, and similes; sentences which embody deep reflections over human truths.

5. Art and Subject

Sadat Hasan Manto is very famous in the world of Urdu short story writing. But in spite of his mastery of the skills of storytelling like Maupassant, he did not escape the vitriolic attacks of critics. This is because of his presentation of social truths and the reality of good and evil in an open manner. “He is presented as a purveyor of obscenity, as a merchant of violence and as one who made capital out of the tragic events of the Partition” (Siddiqui 19). Manto‟s ideas were actually the product of the spirit of that age which made him write realistically. He lashed out very hard at the social evils prevailing at various levels but critics misinterpreted his stories and tagged him as reactionary. However, this ruthless criticism does not put down Manto‟s influence in the history of Urdu literature. Manto‟s collective writings open up the microcosm of India, inclusive of its social, political and economic life, in the context of issues like partition, prostitution, sexuality, poverty and also the film industry etc. Subjects like common man and his society, politics and prostitution, sex 91 and psychology and an internal civil war, to name a few, give a clear image of a brave man [Manto] who wrote truth without hiding any part of it.

As a born artist, Manto moulded his everyday material and objects to create stories on a variety of subjects, but his creations are so real that they puzzle and surprise us. Among his stories, some are romantic and idealistic, others deal with the lower classes of society and these are called sympathetic stories. These stories take a compassionate view of the oppressed people, and harshly critique the social institutions which have suppressed them. For his harsh satire of social institutions as well as his compassion for the oppressed, Abu Said Quraishi, in his biographical reminiscences of Manto, called him rahm-dil dahshat pasand (kind-hearted terrorist) (qtd. in Flemming 13). Besides the short stories of Manto this oxymoronic phrase also describes the conflict in his life. In the words of Flemming, Manto was struggling with the two basic and opposing tendencies: a humanistic, tender regard for other people and an anarchistic desire to rebel against all restraints.

As far as the subject matter of Manto‟s stories is concerned Lesli A. Flemming has given different names to the various collections, such as Political, Revolutionary, Sympathetic, Romantic, Partition stories. The change in the subject matter of his stories was in accordance with the change of context and background in Manto‟s life. The partition of India and his migration from Bombay to Pakistan were two major changes in his life.

Under the title of „sympathetic stories‟ are those stories which deal mostly with the oppressed sections of the society. These stories include Manto‟s best-known stories in which women, especially prostitutes, play the role of heroines. Here Manto‟s approach is not political or humorous, “but rather straightforward, serious and realistic” (Flemming 47). Manto has expressed sympathy for the helpless condition of women. He is often compared with Maupassant in his adoption of themes and techniques. Focusing on the theme of oppressed women, he has highlighted their economic helplessness, social dependency on men, and their victimization in general. Thus, from the feminist perspective, these stories show how women are discriminated against in our society. Considered as the „other”, they are marginalized from society and deprived of political and economic rights. Even in some cases, they have no voice in religious matters because they are considered impure. Analyzing the feminist aspect of Manto, Flemming writes: 92

In contrast to similar stories by Maupassant, with whom Manto is so often compared, none of these stories does more than allude to sexual relations, nor is any more pornographic or obscene, than, for example, Umrao Jan Ada or Premchand‟s Bazar-e Husn. Although all of them are different in subject and theme, and more provides a deep psychological study, all of them evoke considerable sympathy for the women on whom they focus. Finally, through initial emphasis on the helplessness of the women involved and their allusions to the economic reasons for the victimization of the women they portray, all of them not only implicitly criticise the institution of prostitution but also contain implications applicable to women of other classes. (Flemming 50)

Stories that deal with prostitutes maintain a theme that recurs in Manto‟s various stories, and to some extent it was also the favourite theme of some of his contemporaries: the dependence of women on men and their need of male guards. Lesli A. Flemming has given different titles to the various collections of Manto‟s short stories; however, the common thread that runs through all these stories is the “allusions to the economic realities behind prostitution [and] the picture of the position of women” (Flemming 51).This picture is completely passive and dependent on males. There is an apparent contrast and also deep parallels and allusions to classical Indian literature which has created the image of woman as passive, submissive and male-dependent. For example, because of her passivity and dependency, Sultana in “Black Shalwar” is exploited by the males in her life. Manto was of the view that prostitution is the earliest example of female exploitation and it is reflected through the life of Sultana. But the important point, regarding the attitude of Manto, is that he was sympathetic towards these characters and strongly criticized the power and ideology that coerces these women to sell their bodies. Similarly, in his other story “Hatak” Manto‟s primary focus is not on Sugandhi as a prostitute, but on her economic and social condition. Flemming puts it thus:

In fact, “Hatak”, depicts much more clearly… the economically determined facts of a prostitute‟s life, the dirt and degradation of her physical environment are depicted in great, almost sickening detail. It is clear exactly how much she earns from each encounter, how much 93

of it goes to her pimp and what she pays for rent. And the precarious economic situation of respectably married women is also alluded to: Sogandhi‟s motivation for going out a second time is not greed but a desire to earn money for the return journey home of a Madrasi neighbour whose husband has just been killed in an automobile accident. (53)

Therefore, Sugandhi‟s exploitation results from her dependence on men. Like “Hatak”, “Kali Shalwar” is not actually a psychological study of prostitutes in a red- light area, but it is “rather a profound indictment of the position into which Indian society has placed all women” (Flemming 54). The ending of “Hatak” is twisted and unexpected. It is a sign of Manto‟s rebellion against the meaningless traditions of Indian culture. Similarly, Flemming too has observed Manto‟s stress on the deviation that he wanted women to take from the traditional dependent roles:

One wonders, however, if perhaps Sogandhi‟s “abnormality,” in the minds of Manto‟s critics at least, lies rather in her clear departure from the woman‟s traditionally dependent role. To Manto‟s credit, not only does nothing in the story suggest he shared this attitude, but the story leaves the reader profoundly sympathizing with Sogandhi and applauding her courage (54).

Unlike women characters such as Sugandhi and Sultana, Manto also portrayed some rustic women who were not from the urbanized and sophisticated locality, and who were all young, playful, shy and constantly surrounded by nature. Like flowers and trees, they are extremely lovable and attractive. For example, Begu is described as “young. The air of Batote was shining in her youthfulness with great intensity. Dressed in green clothing, in the middle of the road, she seemed like a tall corn stalk” (qtd. in Flemming 58). Due to their “closeness to nature,” these girls “are all pure, innocent and totally irresponsible for their actions; if they have gone wrong in any way, it is the fault of corrupt society” (Flemming 59). Further, Flemming considers these stories escapist in nature, and like the pastorals of European literature these reflect Manto‟s attempt to escape realities, particularly the exploitation of women. They show us the romantic undercurrent in his personality. In this regard, Manto‟s famous short story “Bu”, although presents the theme of isolation and loneliness, can be categorized in the romantic stories. It is unique and unparalleled both in Manto‟s 94 corpus and in entire modern Urdu fiction. “This story…[which] shows Manto both at his most romantic and his most profound, offers a unique and brilliantly realized vision of the cosmic meaning of sexual relations, freed from both commercial and social restraints” (Flemming 60).

The third important dimension of his stories is the depiction of women belonging to the underprivileged class, particularly prostitutes. In the history of Urdu literature, the subject of prostitute and prostitution was not new. It had been employed by many other writers before Manto. However, it was only Manto who presented them with a sympathetic eye and made us believe that they too have a soul which brims with feelings and they are the incarnation of love, sympathy, help, etc. He was deeply aware of their subconscious inner world. He, without seeking pleasure in these characters, delves in the inner recesses to find the pain and tenderness of their souls that is hidden under the apparent merchant‟s smile. He does not want us to sympathize with the prostitutes but with the woman hidden inside the prostitute. This endearing quality made Manto different from the other writers of his age. Through this, he was also able to show that most of his prostitute characters have their own individual identities; however, the social status has been a big stumbling block for them in their quest for identity. These women are not types but individuals, presented in different shades of life. The prostitute is portrayed as more innocent and naive than the woman who is living amidst safe sanctuary of the home. She proves to be the best wife, daughter, friend and most of all a caring mother. For example, Janki, Mami, Zeenat, Sharida, Fobha Bhai are women with the identity of „mother‟.

It is true that in his last years, there was a severe decline in Manto‟s art. One of the most obvious reasons was the economic exigencies of his life in Lahore. As a result, most of the stories in that period were written quickly, without any attention to technical details, reflection and revision (Flemming 110). Another reason may be the shift in his literary relations in Lahore. He was now living cut off from the influences of the Progressive Writers Movement. Despite the decline, there are various stories, both of earlier and later periods, which are enough to assure him a place in the history of the development of Urdu fiction, especially in the genre of short story and particularly in the development of theme, technique, and characterization. In this context Ahmed Ali sums up Manto‟s works thus: 95

No novelist or story writer has been consistently acclaimed by the political section of the Movement as “Progressive” in the sense that Faiz has been, with the exception of Saadat Hasan Manto…perhaps. But after that few brilliant flashes of deeply felt social wrongs and intense desire for social justice, Manto ended up, due to his own peculiar psychological predilections, in a preoccupation with the world of the socially wronged and sexually exploited woman, whether she was the heroine of his “Black Shalwar” or the red-light district of Bombay itself, and became the protagonist of erotic literature and perverted tastes apparent in Urdu writing today. (40) (qtd. in Flemming 29)

6. Realistic Approach and Criticism

In the early period of his writing, Manto was influenced by the new political views of Marxism, its sympathetic and classless attitude towards „common man‟ which was then dominating the whole world. As a result, Manto too produced a lot of stories in the same flow like “Tamasha”, “Inqlaab Pasand”, “Diwana Sha‟ir”, “Khooni Thook”, “Shagul”, “Na‟rah”, “Naya Qanoon” etc. The next thing that caught Manto‟s attention and made him produce various collections of stories was the tumultuous and traumatic event of the partition. His photographic eyes keenly observed the unbearable reality of partition which he depicted in his stories. In this context, Askari pointed out that:

Manto neither provokes the feelings of pity nor hatred; he only invites you to reflect, from the literary and creative perspective, on the human mind, character and personality. If he is inciting any passion, that is the passion that every writer should incite in a rightful way, and that is a lot of tahreer istiajab about the life. (152, Self trans.)

Since Manto started his career as a translator of French and Russian fiction, “his short stories bear the unmistakable imprint of the kind of realism practised by Maupassant and Gorky,” (19) says Asaduddin with regard to Manto‟s affinity with Guy de Maupassant. Manto believed strongly in realism and as far as his own writings are considered, he once wrote to Qasmi, in November 1938, that “we ought to present life as it is, not as it was, nor as it will be, not as it ought to be” (qtd. in Flemming 32). Thus realism to Manto was related to life at present, presented without moral 96 justifications for past and recommending prophecies for future. For example, Manto has written “Naya Qanoon” (The New Law) in the classical realistic tradition of a beginning, a well-fleshed out middle and an end which “marks his first attempt to frappe, with any degree of psychological realism, with a lower class character” (Flemming 44). Further, as for the theme and style is concerned, Manto has been largely influenced by Maupassant, and quite a few of his stories bear the evidence. In this context, Leslie A. Flemming has maintained that:

Impressionistic elements generally disappeared from Manto‟s short stories after 1943. Instead, the vast majority of his earlier and later stories contain the Maupassant‟s style of well-constructed plot, containing a single episode, the incidents of which follows one another in logical order, in which there are no extraneous incidents and in which the ending of the story resolves the various elements of the plot into a satisfying denouement. (96-97)

Manto only portrayed what he saw and his stories are based on realism. It is very unfortunate that he was charged for the depiction of reality of the society he was living in. In his famous lecture, delivered to the students of Jageshwari College in Bombay in 1944, he claims, “If you are not familiar with the period we are passing through, read my stories. If you cannot bear these stories, that means this is an unbearable time. The evils in me are those of this era” (qtd. in Flemming 32). Similarly, he writes in his essay, “Safaid Jhoot” (White Lie) that “I am a man who…writes because he has something to say. Whatever I see, the way and the angle I see it from, I present it to others in that very way and angle” (Manto Kuliyat 113). Moreover, he asserts, “We writers are not prophets. We see one thing, one problem, in different conditions and from different angles, and whatever we understand we present to the world, and we never force [you] to accept it” (qtd. in Flemming 32). So, after reading these claims by Manto, it can be said that Manto believed strongly in realism and none of his characters can be described as abnormal or obscene, but rather they are, according to Manto, presented honestly, sympathetically, and even optimistically. He neither wanted to cure the disease or hide the evils of society nor was he morally setting the norms for a good society, as it was not his job. He expressed his idea that, “I am not seditious. I do not want to stir up people‟s ideas and 97 feeling. If I take off the blouse of culture and society, then it is naked. I do not try to put clothes back on, because that is not my job…” (qtd. in Flemming 33)

There is a reflection of a real society in the Manto‟s stories and how its institutions are working, how the ideology of these institutions regulate laws, create binary oppositions, divide people into different classes and make some people rule and dominate others. These stories also reflect very seriously on the system in which women are suffering as „others‟. Therefore, his stories reflect a real society, the society which he has seen and lived in.

As a realist, Manto had the courage to unveil the realities of the human psyche by probing its innermost recesses, to expose the dark forces. His statement that he exposes the society in which he lived in, however, does not limit his relevance to the boundary of a specific period. Reality for Manto was not only an external aspect but a more inclusive concept. By dealing with human emotions, experiences and passions, Manto transcended his age and time, as these aspects of human life are universal and timeless. That is why in contrast to his contemporaries who are passing into oblivion, Manto‟s relevance and reputation is growing.

Being primarily associated with Realism and Modernism, he depicted what his eyes saw and pictured photographically everyday life. As a modernist, he broke the conventional rules and regulations of art and literature and began some innovative experiments in the genre of the short story. Manto rebelled against the old literature of narration of the tales of fantasy and dream world. As a keen observer and sensitive thinker Manto “wrote what he saw and felt, and wrote compulsively and prodigiously” (Jalil viii). He is considered as the greatest of realist writers after Munshi Prem Chand who began to narrate the tale of his experience in the world around him.

7. Accusations of Obscenity: A Misinterpretation

The image of Sadat Hasan Manto in the world of short story writing is contradictory, or in other words, it is inglorious and ignominious. Although his stories are purely artistic creations and the feeling of amativeness or eroticism never touches us while reading them, but he has been accused of obscenity many times by the guardians of morality during his lifetime. Some would call him angel while others labelled him the devil, obscene and intolerable. The irony of the fact is that he brought the truth into limelight which the people of hypocrite society were hiding. Yet his five 98 stories have been charged for obscenity and for which he was time and again hauled up before the court of law. In the first three cases, he was fined and later, on a request, he was acquitted with honour and the fines that had been imposed on him were also refunded. But Manto was charged with obscenity for fourth and fifth time for his two stories “Thanda Gosht” and “Upar, Niche aur Darmian”. At that time he was too ill to defend the cases and with the result he was fined by the court. His critics declared Manto retrogressive and licentious.

These trials wasted Manto‟s most important ten years. Around the law courts Manto‟s life was affected gravely - economically, socially, mentally and even in his last years, he went through mental crises. He gave vent to this excruciatingly depressing situation thus:

My heart wants to burn all my works and begin with any other different work that has nothing to do with the creativity. I want to take a job in the Tax (toll) department and feed my children by the bribery. Neither will I criticize anything nor give my views on any matter. (Manto, Ganjay Farishte 198)

These pathetic lines mirror the predicament in which Manto was suffering in. If he would have a job somewhere else where he would have taken bribery, perhaps he would have never been tried. It shows that Manto was fed up with the structures of the society where oppression of downtrodden class was strengthening and deepening its roots. Thus, through his short stories, Manto questioned and raised his voice against the unjust system of the society. Ali Sardar Jafiri had considered Manto‟s short story writing as “the whimper of wrong consciousness of middle class” (qtd. in Masna 115). Further, in this context, Gopi Chand Narang‟s cardinal quote “Manto ki zindagi ma Manto ko kam samjha gaya balki samjha he nahi gaya” (Manto was understood very little in his life, rather, he was not understood at all.) (qtd. in Raza Hasan, NCPUL 318) directly points out the fact that Manto was misunderstood in his life. He was accused of obscenity and pornography, but people realized their mistake only after his death. According to Gopi Chand Narang, the infamous short stories of Manto are not actually the tragedy of women‟s nudity, but they are about the strange sensuality and secular tragedy of men. In his study of women, Manto showed their pure soul in dirty bodies. He says that Manto‟s art is much more about the pain and suffering of prostitutes than the apparent nudity. He is the artist of inner pain rather 99 than their apparent smile. (qtd. in Hasan Raza 319). Flemming also pointed out in this regard that “Manto‟s sympathetic stories, most of which are badly misread, do indeed deal with important social issues; in earlier stories the exploitation of women, and in later stories the hypocrisy and deception of the film world and, by extension, all of modern life.” (Flemming 111). Moreover, Abdul Salman Samad in his “Manto: Fun Aur Shakhsiyat” (Manto: Art and Personality) has defended Manto against the charges of obscenity by saying that Manto drew the material from the downtrodden class of society [prostitutes] and various critics indicted him for obscenity. However, his stories show nothing but the torment and impuissance (40). Salman Abdul Samad says that though Manto‟s passages present a world we have seen and known, he searched the truth that was slipping from our eyes. His stories present the third world of oppressed people. “Sadat Hasan Manto‟s stories are not merely events, rather its characters and environment of the downtrodden third world contain the narratives of conflict. The stories of Manto will remain at the summit of literature till the art of story writing remains alive” (Samad 40, Self trans.). Furthermore, Abdul Samad quotes Professor Mohammad Mosin, an eminent scholar in the field of psychology, who has studied Manto‟s relationship with women and found that whether in reality or in his fictional world, his relationship with women was pure and sympathetic. Mosin‟s psychological observation regarding Manto‟s attitude towards women is:

That parts of a woman which provoke sexual desires didn‟t call Manto‟s interest, however, the attraction was to such parts that have nothing to do with sexual desires. He liked the feet of Moly Diptrich very much. When he first saw Neelam, the heroine of the film, “Ban ki Sundari”, his eyes only fall on her feet. “I look at professional women with secret eyes. If any woman comes suddenly before me, I can‟t see anything.” (qtd. in Abdul Samad 41)

Therefore, in view of the above discussion, the accusations of the obscenity of Manto‟s stories was the result misinterpretation of his stories in which irony and sarcasm were his major tools which helped him to achieve his aim to highlight the social hypocrisy. As an ironist, he has played with words and used them in such a way that without reading his stories between the lines, the real meaning is impossible. “Sarcasm, irony, bitterness, a sense of irritation and a grim sense of humour” in Wadhwan‟s words “are the outstanding traits of Manto‟s stories. Sarcasm surfaces so 100 naturally in his fiction that it becomes the very warp and woof of his writing” (6-7). Further, his masterpieces such as “Babu Gopi Nath,” “Mozil,” “Mummy” and “Toba Tek Singh” have nothing to do with obscenity and, in fact, these obscenity charges has not been able to belittle his artistic fame so far.

8. Western Influences: “Manto the Heir of Maupassant”

Most of the critics have acknowledged that Manto was considerably influenced by Guy de Maupassant. Manto himself accepted him as his fictional father, and in this sense Chandrahas Choudhury has called Manto as “the heir of Maupassant” in his article “Presence of the past”. It is in this context that Mumtaz Shireen, Leslie A. Flemming, Aakar Patel and many other critics of Manto have entitled him as the Maupassant of Urdu literature.

Had Manto not come in contact with his mentor and guide Bari Alig who presented him with a copy of Hugo‟s The Last Days of the Condemned and asked him to translate it into Urdu, he would have continued living the life of disparity and dissipation like his earlier years. It was Bari sahib who introduced Manto to the great novelists and to the skillfully crafted writings of Oscar Wilde, Guy de Maupassant and to Victor Hugo‟s Les Miserables. Manto read Hugo‟s masterpiece Les Miserables and was overwhelmed by Hugo‟s style, and “it seemed to have so overpowered his mind that he thought it worth his while to make an attempt in this direction” (Wadhawan 21). Manto‟s first translated book published with the title Aseer Kie Sarguzasht (The Life Story of a Prisoner) made him feel very proud and boosted his interest in the literary field.

Manto‟s inclination towards French and Russia literature was actually the result of the guidance of Abdul Bari Alig. Bari Sahab in a very small period of time changed the young man‟s inclinations towards literature. It was also under the guidance of Bari Alig that young impatient Sadat Hasan developed into the serious artist Manto who began enthusiastically reading writers like Victor Hugo, Lord Lytton, Gorki, Chekhov, Pushkin, Oscar Wilde, Guy de Maupassant and many others. The literary relationship with Bari Alig proved very fruitful. It was a kind of relationship which was similar to the literary relation of Flaubert and Maupassant half a century earlier. Like Flaubert, Bari Alig moulded young Manto‟s literary career and turned his interest towards literature, especially the revolutionary literature of Russia and France. “The soil on which Bari Alig had sowed the seed proved fertile. A plant 101 has sprouted on it which, with time, promised to grow into a tree” (Wadhawan 22). Further, Wadhawan comments on their relationship thus:

Manto came to attain his eminent stature on the foundation laid for him by Bari. It was Bari who pulled him out of the mire where he was wallowing in the company of vagabonds and loafers and put him on a straight path. He nurtured in him the love of literature. He galvanized the wayward youth to recognize his inherent potential. (22)

The next book Manto translated in collaboration with Hasan Abbas was Oscar Wilde‟s play, Vera. Afterwards, Manto turned his attention to translating some Russian short stories which found a place in the prestigious monthly magazine Humayun. Manto also translated some of the stories of Gorky and later compiled the Russian number Alamgir which was very well received. The success gave a remarkable boost to his confidence so that he made a challenging offer to the magazine Saqi to bring out a special issue on French Literature; however, this suggestion did not materialize. After a lot of struggle with works of translation and their publication in different magazines, Manto turned his attention towards writing a story which appeared anonymously in Khulk entitled “Tamasha”. This story presents the historical incident of Martial Law of 1919 seen through the eyes of a child. Manto himself had seen it when he was only seven years old.

Different critics have different views about the affinity of Manto with Western writers and their influence on him. For example, Quraishi is of view that “Maupassant, Kuprin and Zola had a hand in the development of the sympathy Manto has for anyone” (78.). Mumtaz Shireen in “Maghribi Afsane ka Asar” (Influence of Western Short Story) has analysed the influence of European writers on the Urdu short story genre in general and has highlighted significantly Maupassant‟s affinity and influence on Manto in particular. She points out that “In our literature, Maupassant‟s story in its fully developed form… is Manto‟s story. With us, no writer but Manto has adopted Maupassant‟s style with such success” (Shireen 88).

Although there are diverse views given by different scholars and critics of Manto, the fact remains that Manto was indeed an heir to the rich cultural and literary legacy of nineteenth-century European fiction. The influence mainly chiselled his art of portraying sympathetic characters, especially of women, oppressed by social institutions. To Maupassant and Chekhov he owes his realistic approach in depicting 102 the reality of society without moralizing or suggesting didacticism. In this context, Lesli A. Flemming avers that:

These differences of opinions notwithstanding, Manto was indeed heir to the legacy of [the] nineteenth century European fiction. In general, two aspects of Manto‟s approach to the short story bear the marks of European influence. The first is his overwhelming preference for sympathetically portraying characters oppressed by social institution…From reading both Gorky and Maupassant‟s works, Manto developed an interest in portraying lower class life. Like both Maupassant and Chekhov, however, Manto, consciously adopted an objective stance towards the subjects of his fiction, realistically and accurately depicting the conditions of their lives without suggesting any means of ameliorating their difficulties. (37)

Manto also adopted other techniques from European writers such as the well- structured plot and unexpected endings in his short stories. Manto had read Maupassant and was influenced by him greatly. Like Maupassant, his choice of subject matter was also vast. He wrote about prostitution, religious superstitions, adolescent anxiety, sex, the Partition of India, Bombay cinema etc. These were the great themes of the day and “though the stories are not forgiving, nor do they falsify the hard realities of India, there is something euphoric in the writing, it is easy to sense the writer‟s joy in the newness and variety of life” (Taseer, Preface xxiii)

Though Manto was influenced by the Europeans thinkers, artists and fiction writers, but he never tried to imitate them. He himself was a born artist. Manto was influenced by Freud; however, he never let Freudian ideas dominate, especially when he was writing stories of the sexual relationship between a man and a woman. Although Manto had read Marx and was influenced by him greatly, however, it was not Marx forcing him to write against the social injustice and inequality, but Manto‟s own inner consciousness. Similarly, as far as the subject and style of his stories is concerned, Maupassant has a great influence on him. Sex was one of the favourite subjects of both the writers; however, Maupassant‟s eyes were mostly looking for the hidden inner sexual ungodliness in the apparently pure virtuous lives of civilized women. Contrary to this, Manto would search for the pure, sympathetic and virtuous aspect of women in infamous and notorious prostitutes. In other words, Maupassant‟s 103 stories reveal the dark side of society while Manto‟s stories search for light in the darkness. In this context, Tariq Chhatari points out that Manto is sometimes considered as a progressive writer for the same positive point of view (65-66).

Being influenced by Maupassant‟s realistic representations, Manto‟s similar treatment made his stories universally praised. He has been appreciated for his realism and his artistic virtuosity with which he has produced the world in his fiction, which mirrors social, economic, political, religions and even psychological aspects of people. His satire on the society was abrasive but moralizing. Above all, he has unfolded the sexual life in a particular and unique way. Even when we talk about the characters in his stories, they are mostly drawn from “the flotsam and jetsam of society—the down-and-outs, rakes and debauches” (Wadhawan 160), but they are real. Manto had spent his life among them; he knew them - both their inner and outer, body and spirit. He has observed them day and night from close quarters. He sympathized with them as if he was one of them. Manto‟s capacity for delving into the minds and hearts of people compares him with Guy de Maupassant and this comparison is beautifully described by Wadhawan as:

We can find his [Manto‟s] parallel in Maupassant. Nature had bestowed upon him the sinister power of delving into the human mind. But this power of understanding man had also made him a cynic. However, it may sound a bit paradoxical, that despite man‟s petty- mindedness, jealousy, degeneration, and such other foibles, which made Manto a cynic, he still loved man for what he was. He shared his sorrows and felt for him, which is very apparent from his stories. Manto was undoubtedly a great artist like Maupassant but he was perhaps a step or two ahead of him. (161)

Manto is not an ordinary short story writer. His comparison with the world‟s greatest short story writers such as Chekov and Maupassant is very logical. As a born artist, the story writing was his innate gift. It was as natural as anything from breathing to sleeping. Stories came to him naturally. Further in the words of Alam Zauqui:

He had the same status as Chekov and Maupassant in literature. He is counted among those fortunate writers whose artistic gifts/endowments were accepted in their own lives. Fame would itself kiss his feet. When 104

critics would talk about Manto, they begin to compare him with Chekov and Maupassant … In thousands of stories, essays, and sketches—from Gangay Farishte to Siya Hashe, Manto did so many experiments that perhaps Chekov and Maupassant might not have done so many.” (56 Self trans.)

Thus, the influence of Western tradition can be traced throughout his writings in which he made innovative efforts in both form and content. However, his analysis and realistic approach to characters, their social milieu and their political importance was purely his own. Manto gave the Urdu short story the new subjects, a novel way of handling language and experimentations that were almost lacking at that period. He was innovative as far his choice of certain unacceptable characters and themes are concerned.

9. Conclusion

The fact cannot be denied that both Maupassant and Manto were prolific writers, and during the climax of their literary productivity they produced stories with ease, even two or three in a single week. Mary Donaldson-Evans says that “Maupassant was contributing an average of two stories weekly to newspapers, there being in general no lapse of time between the writing and the first publishing” (Evans 66). Similarly, Manto has produced stories even in midst of his family, playing with his daughters, with consistent critical acclaim.

Maupassant and Manto resemble each other, though the talent of the one is peculiarly French and the talent of the other is peculiarly Indian. Both are the masters of the short story, and characteristically, in their stories, they portray the life as it is, whether it is love, jealousy or war. The irony was their useful tool by which they highlighted the hypocrisy of the bourgeois class. They immediately became popular, which means that both were on the ordinary level of thought and feeling, and wrote for ordinary men and women of their societies. Most characters of Maupassant, as also in the Manto‟s stories, belong to the lower class of society, among which the peasants and particularly women play an important role. K.V. Surendran in his preface to New Perspectives on Indian and Western Fiction acknowledges the same fact in a larger perspective that “irrespective of cultural background, fiction whether Indian or Western shows similarity in themes and characterization” (v). 105

The personal life of both Guy de Maupassant and Sadat Hasan Manto too contain various similarities, even if as a matter of coincidence. Both the writers expired after living about forty-two years. In their last years, both were victims of lunatic hallucinations and were committed to asylums for some time. Both the writers gave their literary output mostly in their last decade of life and have prolifically written short stories, novels, sketches and letters, and also have been accused of obscenity in their writings. Moreover, their relationship with their mothers was stronger than with their fathers; both experience an awful relationship with their fathers. Their mothers were their whole inspirations. Maupassant was self-centred and inaccessible to strangers, “but his family affections and his rare friendships were intensely passionate and tender. His mother was an ideal to him” (Harris 265).

Both Sadat Hasan Manto and Maupassant considered an individual innocent; they believed that society and its dominant institutions are responsible for crime or injustice. For example, in “La Petite Roque” (Little Louise Roque) Maupassant “studies the problem as to how an honest man in an hour of aberration, can become the equal of the worst criminal” (Johnston 303). Yevette is doomed because of her low origin. Similarly, the circumstances lead to the destruction of people in Maupassant‟s stories like “Parent”, “Le Horla”, “Bel Ami”, “Boule de Suif” “L‟Inutile Beaute” etc. On the other hand, Manto too has similar concerns in his partitions stories such as “Open it,” “Cold Meat” and other stories on prostitution such as “Hatak,” “License,” “Black Shalwar” etc. to name a few.

On the whole, to sum-up the artistic life of both the writers, it can be said that their literary life of only ten years was prolific without any pause, “starting with the instant conquest of celebrity and ending suddenly in hopeless madness” (Doumic 215). On the one hand the memorable words, “I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt” (Neveux 3) by Maupassant to Jose Maria de Heredia, in brief, sum-up the short but the very productive life of Maupassant, who with “the fertility of a master hand produced poetry, novels, romances and travels, only to sink prematurely into the abyss of madness and death. . . .” (Neveux 1), while on the other hand, Manto‟s claim that “It is possible that Sadat Hasan may soon die but Manto many still live on” and “If I write only one line, it is art” proved him as an immortal artist, whose art could never be wiped away from the history of literature.

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CHAPTER IV

109

Intricate Portrait of Female Sexuality: A Feminist Reading of the Select Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant

Outline

This chapter is an extensive feminist study of Maupassant’s short stories and focuses on the element female representation in his works. It begins by discussing how with the emergence of the New Woman resulted in the crises of masculinity in France, and following that how male authors, in dread, began to portray female characters in negative binaries to assert their ‘unshakable’ self. In Maupassant’s short stories she is presented as a complex being - an amalgamation of degenerating ‘other’ and saviour of the nation, and source of goodness. But generally, Maupassant has described the sexual decadence of the late nineteenth- century France, hypocrisy of society, and oppression of the women belonging to the lower class.

1. Introduction: Fin de Siècle and Masculinity Crises in Maupassant’s Stories

Fin de siècle (end of the century), the period of late nineteenth-century, was a period of gender chaos. Many critics and historians identify this period as the period of crisis in masculinity. It gave birth to ‗New Woman‘ ―as a social, political and economic threat to male hegemony‖ (Patrick 17). The term was coined by Sara Grand in her article ―The New Aspect of the Woman Question‖ published in 1894. The New Woman as a complex figure has multiple identities about whom Sally Ledger, a Victorian literature and nineteenth-century women‘s writing scholar, writes: ―She was, variously, a feminist activist, a social reformer, a popular novelist, a suffragette playwright, and woman poet; she was also often a fictional construct, a discursive response to the activities of the late-nineteenth century women‘s movement‖ (The New Woman 1). In this period the emancipated ―New Woman‖ and the ―effeminate‖ decadent dandy became the two prominent gender codes which dismantled the 110 established traditional gender structures (Filipowicz 104). Not only in France but also in the major European countries, for example, late nineteenth-century England was also ―the haunt of the dandy, whose predilection for decadent clothes masked effeminate sexuality‖ (qtd. in Berberich 41). Man was alarmed by the dwindling of traditional binary gender differences which had stabilized his powerful position. The period of late nineteenth-century also shattered the Victorian identity of woman as the ―Angel in the House‖ who had been circumscribed within the four walls and lived a passive, powerless, self-sacrificing, pious and pure life. He also felt the loss of identity which he had been traditionally maintaining under patriarchy and male- dominance. Thus men began to resist the rise of the ‗New Woman‘ very strongly. One of the forms of resistance was literature. However, it also paved the way for women to assert their identity and demands of equality. As a matter of fact, the literature produced by male writers during this period presents a kind of misogynistic attitude. According to David Gilmore, an American anthropologist, the revival and intensification of misogyny in the literature of late nineteenth-century can be seen more than in any other period. The misogynist attitude, as it is common in most cultures, languages, and literature, is not an exception in the literature of France. The most fervent cause behind this attitude was the rise of many women‘s emancipation movements. This misogynist attitude towards women and the threat to male identity itself defined the crisis of masculinity within Western culture during this period. The crisis of masculinity gave rise to the type of literature in which woman was objectified as a ―horrible essence of a distance, pre-evolutionary male past, a creature permanently ready to use her charm and her physical beauty to keep man away from his search for spiritual enlightenment‖ (Filipowicz 105). Woman was presented as unfaithful, and waiting for men whom she could betray, trap and kill. Further, the motifs such as the seductive woman who transgresses the social laws and then ruins her husband became the prominent themes in the literature of the period. The vision of her figure was like the Great Harlot, or in other words, an embodiment of death. She has been represented as ―eternally destructive‖. However, by this representation, she transcended the conventional ideal ―Angel in the House‖ and thus her character shattered the binary oppositions, mostly prevalent in the Victorian Age in England and in late-nineteenth-century France. 111

In France, writers like Zola, Maupassant, Hennique, Bourget and Armand Charpentier presented her in the same way. In Maupassant‘s writings, the female representation takes a more complex shape as she has been portrayed in different shades. As his fiction is commonly regarded as misogynistic, therefore, her character has been degraded as a ‗useless female‘. However, this misogynistic accusation would be a misunderstanding if generalized to his whole oeuvre because there are a number of other stories and novels in which Maupassant has not only presented the female characters realistically and sympathetically but has given them a subjective position which acts as a metaphor for the destruction of the conventional roles of submissive women. In these stories, Maupassant emancipates woman by creating very powerful female characters who, by their powerful voice and subjectivity, shatter the conventional construction of gender and objectification of their sexuality, and sometimes resist oppression. Therefore, apart from the strong elements of misogyny, the female sexuality in many of his stories has been presented in a way that can be compared with those of the ―Pro-Feminist‖ New Woman writers of England and France.

The ‗macho‘ public figure of Maupassant made many of his critics ignore his understanding of masculinity and female sexuality. In his stories, he has presented both the genders in a very complex manner. The macho figure of man, traditionally given a status of a warrior, soldier and conqueror, can be seen in the character of Capitan Epivent, in Maupassant‘s story ―Le Lit 29‖ (Bed No. 29). He confirmed the masculinity myth of the solider as a big guy who conquers, whether in love or in war. Further, in his another story ―La Moustache‖ (The Moustache) he propounded the same masculinity myth by considering a moustache as a traditional symbol of masculinity. The age Maupassant lived in was challenged by the rise of ‗New Woman‘, which was a threat to the masculinity myth; therefore, while asserting masculinity in his story ―Good Reasons‖, Maupassant claims, ―Truly, a man without a moustache is not a man. I do not care much for a beard; it always gives an appearance of neglect; but the moustache, oh! the moustache is indispensable to a manly physiognomy‖ (TCSSM 471). In this context, Jonathan Patrick says that the traditional value or concept of ―man‘s man‖ or solider as the embodiment of strength, virility, energy, heterosexuality, promiscuity etc. which combined to make up ‗true man,‘ was literally and metaphorically exterminated in 1870. In the war the French men were 112 recognized by their moustaches, but after the war France was left bereft of strong and virile men to defend it. Therefore, Maupassant‘s various stories propound this masculinity crisis whereby ―the traditionally male duties of violent revenge, resistance, defence of the nation and of its people are taken up by women‖ (Patrick 19). For example, the prostitute characters like Boule de Suif, Irma in ―Bed No. 29‖, and Rachel in ―Mademoiselle Fifi‖; the elderly characters such as Father Pierre Milon, Mother Savage and the middle-aged, typically corpulent, bourgeoisie like M. Dubuis, Momsot and Sauvage in ―Deux Amis‖.

On the one hand, in ―Pattern and Symbol in the Work of Maupassant‖ G. Hainsworth has explained in detail how Maupassant‘s fiction and his journalistic essays were influenced by Flaubert‘s laborious simplicity and by Schopenhauer‘s theories on women and the human tendency. However, later on Maupassant discarded philosophical spectacles of Arthur Schopenhauer which, like Freud, enlarged and distorted things especially when it talks about the sexuality and desires of men and women. On the other hand, O‘Connor has objected and insisted that in Maupassant‘s stories ―the sexual act itself turns into a form of murder‖ (qtd. in Bloom 12) and thus considered his stories unsatisfactory as compared to those of Chekhov and Turgenev. However, for Maupassant wives are naturally unfaithful; whereas, Schopenhauer has declared fidelity as the rule and thus deplores adultery on part of the wife. Therefore, keeping all these nuances of contextual background in view the chapter attempts to explore the complexity of the representation of female sexuality in Maupassant‘s stories.

2. Maupassant’s Short Stories: A Feminist Reading

Maupassant‘s story ―A Public Meeting‖ directly points to the female progressiveness which was gaining heights during the second half of the nineteenth- century. The story narrates the misogynist attitude prevalent in the period against the emergence of the New Woman and other pro-feminist movements. Monsieur Patissot, the main character of the story, happens to visit a ―Ball‖ where a debate on ―General International Association for Vindication of Rights of Women‖ has been organized. Inside the hall, many feminists who are expected to deliver speeches for the liberation of women are on the stage. All these feminists, including the male one, Sapience Cornut, are described in a stereotypical language. For example, ―On the right, a delegation of antique citizenesses, severed from their husbands, dried up in celibacy 113 and exasperated with waiting, sat opposite a group of citizen ‗reformers of humanity,‘ who had never cut their beards nor their hair, no doubt to indicate the infinitude of their aspirations‖ (Maupassant, SSTCL 73). Even among those sitting in the front row among the audience are described in racial terms as ―a negro, clad in yellow ticking, curly-haired and magnificent, stared at the presiding officers, and grinned from ear to ear with a silent, restrained laugh, that showed his white teeth gleaming out his black face‖ (Maupassant, SSTCL 74). The meeting is opened by Zoe Lamour by pointing out ―servitude of woman since the beginning of the world; her obscure, but always heroic position, her constant devotion to all great ideas‖ (Maupassant, SSTCL 74). Later, she shook the hall by her words: ―The people had its ‗eighty-nine - let us have ours! Oppressed man made his Revolution; the captive broke his chain, the outraged slave revolted! Women! Let us imitate our despots! Let us revolt! Let us break the ancient chain of marriage and of servitude; let us march to the conquest of our rights, let us, also, make our revolution!‖ (Maupassant, SSTCL 74). The story further describes the speeches of feminists against the oppressor, ―to strike at the tyranny of man‖ (SSTCL 75) one by one. In between the speeches, the story presents a dialogue between Patissot and the other man sitting beside him who calls these feminists as ―hysterical woman‖. Even the male feminist is not spared by him as he calls him ―a little crazy‖ because ―there are millions like him. It is result of education‖ (SSTCL 77). On this Patissot asked him that how education could make someone crazy. ―Yes. Now that they know how to read and to write, their latent foolishness comes out‖ (SSTCL 77), replied the man. The misogynist attitude of the audience against the feminist movement, and particularly, the hatred against the male feminist speaker, Sapience Cornut, can be seen in these words: ―if there is anything wrong in that infinitely complicated machine known as France, he believes himself the most capable of men to repair it at a sitting‖ (SSTCL 77). After they delivered their speeches, one among the audience came on the stage and began to combat the feminist theories. His speech from the story has been quoted by Thomas Nevers in an article ―De Maupassant on Feminism‖, published in the New York Times on May 29, 1916.

Nevers was well aware of ―Feminine Progressiveness‖ and the emergence of ―New Women‖ during the late 19th century. According to Nevers, Maupassant‘s stories, particularly the one quoted by him, could be evaluated in relation to the 114 feminist progressive currents. In view of the conventions of ‗Women‘s Club‘ held that time, Nevers found it quite appropriate to point out the prevalent misogynistic male attitude in the period. The passage from the story reads as:

Mesdames, I have asked to be permitted to speak in order to combat your theories. To demand for women civil rights equal to those exercised by men is equivalent to demanding the end of your power. The exterior aspect alone of women reveals that she is not destined for hard physical labour, nor prolonged intellectual efforts. Her sphere is another, but not less beautiful. She puts poetry into life. By the power of her grace, the glance of her eyes, the charm of her smile, she dominated man, who dominated the world. Man has strength which you cannot take from him; but you have seduction which captivates his strength. Of what do you complain? Since the world has begun you have been queens and rulers. Nothing is done without you. It is for you that all fine work is accomplished.

But the day in which you become our equals, civilly and politically, you become our rivals. Take care, then, that the charm that constitutes your whole strength shall not be broken. For then, as we are incontestably the more vigorous and better equipped for the sciences and arts, your inferiority will appear and you will become truly oppressed.

You have a fine role to play. Mesdames, since for us you represent the whole seductiveness of life, the illimitable illusion, the external reward of our efforts. Do not seek to change this. Besides, you will never succeed in doing so.‖ (Maupassant 78-79)

In the passage, the speaker at the very outset reveals his intention when he asks for permission to speak ―to combat your theories‖; the theories of feminism; theories which guided women to seek equality; and those theories which always encouraged women that they are not inferior beings. The speaker, further, attempts to justify that a woman should not demand freedom and power because she is delicate, beautiful, weak, inferior etc. She is called a temptress who has seductive powers. Her power of seduction is described by the narrator as: ―the power of her grace, the glance of her eyes, [and] the charm of her smile she has dominated man, who dominated the 115 world‖. The speaker‘s definition of woman is similar to the conventional stereotyping of her as an artefact suitable for fine works of art only. He segregates the two sexes create the binary of male/female, powerful/weak, active/passive etc. The threat of equality makes him express illogical but tricky statements. His anti-feminist attitude is clear when he says that ―to demand for women civil rights equal to those exercised by men is equivalent to demanding the end of your power‖. He is conscious of the fact that if women were given equal rights the male-dominance will be crushed and they can prove their competence and strength in all fields of life. Thus, he warns them by propounding the patriarchal ideology that men are more vigorous and better equipped for the sciences and arts than women so that the inferiority complex and the lack of competence would dominate women and make them more oppressed. He further warns the ladies that women should not seek equality because they can never succeed in achieving it. Therefore, the crises of masculinity following the rise of feminist movements in late-nineteenth-century France was one of the main concerns of Maupassant‘s writings.

Maupassant‘s oeuvre presents different shades of life and characterizes all types of men and women belonging to different sections and backgrounds. Like Giovanni Carmelo Verga, Luigi Pirandello, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov and James Joyce, Maupassant‘s majority of stories also focus on the lower middle-class people, particularly the marginalized people of the society including prostitutes and other pariahs. They also include other average working men, petty bureaucrats and peasants. His stories realistically portray the day-to-day life which has a universal appeal. These stories, as already mentioned, were published in eminent periodicals such as Gil Blas, Echo de Paris, or Le Figaro, which were not possible for common people to read; however, later, these stories were reprinted in other popular journals and magazines of literature such as Le Petit Journal, Le Petit Parisien, La Lanterne and L’Intransigeant (Goyet 97). Bil Bilas, usually considered as men‘s magazine, published mainly the misogynistic stories of Maupassant. These are also called as the ―high society‖ short stories such as ―La Bûche‖ (The Log), ―Le Gâteau‖ (The Cake), ―Le Verrou‖ (The Lock), ―Mon Oncle Sosthène‖ (My Uncle Sosthenes), ―Sauvée‖ (Saved), ―Verga‘s Giuramenti di marinaio‖ (Sailor‘s Oaths), ―Carmen and Commedia da salotto‖ (Drawing-room Comedy) etc., to name a few. According to Florence Goyet, these stories are the best among Maupassant‘s 116 stories because the characters presented are slightly unusual and there is a mixture of different sections of society to create amusement and irony (99). Besides these Maupassant has produced some colonial short stories describing the foreign settings and characters totally in colonial and racial terminology. The author of these stories represents the French colonial superiority attitude towards the native people of Algeria and North Africa. These stories were written when Algeria was one of the colonies under French rule from 1830 to 1962.

In 1881 and 1888 Maupassant‘s two trips to Algeria and North Africa produced various writings including travelogues and many short stories and articles, furnished with foreign characters and settings. In these writings, like many other writers and paints such as Delacroix, Formentin, Flaubert, Nerval, and Gautier, Maupassant ―utilized [his] encounters with the Maghreb as fodder for the creative imagination often presenting a male patriarchal perspective and flight of fancy from the mundane existence of Industrial Revolution bourgeois France‖ ( Poteau-Tralie 141). Especially in his short stories he offered some interesting perspectives on the subject of ―foreigners‖ (the term can be interchangeably related to the term ―other‖ in the postcolonial perspective). These stories also known as ‗African‘ short stories are famous for the depiction of foreign characters, especially women, who have been portrayed as ‗exotically‘ beautiful and morally questionable. For example, his short story ―Allouma‖ explicitly develops a kind of world vision which underlies all these short stories in this category. In this story, Maupassant has presented a very contradictory image of both Algeria as landscape and its people. Though he had always asserted his art as ‗objective‘, yet he could not help himself to fall into the trap of European colonial gaze here in ―exoticizing‖ both landscape and women living there. The Algerian landscape is described in dichotomies in that it appears ―at the same time wooded and bare, grand and charming,‖ (Maupassant TOMOS 68) terrain and valley, and even the tents of Arabs have been described as ―fixed to the earth, like limpets are to a rock‖ (Maupassant TOMOS 69). Further, the landscape dichotomies parallel with the other dichotomies and binaries which have been used for the description of both Algerian men and women such as male/female, conqueror/conquered, inside/outside, occidental upright/oriental repulsive brute, and active colonizer/silenced submissive colonized. Moreover, the trees and fruits, described in the story, symbolize the colonial encounter as the crushing of fruits under foot by a French would mean the 117 coming of French colonial as a conqueror. In this context, Mary Poteau-Tralie in her essay ―Reframing Guy de Maupassant‘s ―Allouma‖ through the Lens of Assia Djebar: Postcolonial Algeria Confronts Colonial France‖ sees the depiction of Algeria as colonial and fanaticized or even ‗oriental‘ geographical spaces ―steep in the Realist tradition to find a locus for a flight of imagination‖ (141). Therefore, this mystifying and silencing portrayal of Algeria, particularly its female, can be seen in the traditional canonical colonial texts throughout history.

The story is written in a frame narrative and the narrator within the frame, Monsieur Auballe, is a colonial figure who is regarded as ―the person with knowledge‖ and he looks like a ―jolly Hercules‖ (Maupassant TOMOS 71), the superiority adjectives for the Occidental colonizer. He has a long familiarity with the Arabian world as he has been in Algeria for nine years now, and it is he who has developed the stereotype of ―lying Arab‖. For example, when the eponym character Allouma narrates her story to him on his insistence, he describes it as:

She told me her story, or rather a story, for no doubt she was lying from beginning to end, like all Arabs always do, with or without any motive…one of the most surprising and incomprehensible signs of the native character— the Arabs always lie…. lying forms part of their being, of their heart and soul, until it has become a kind of second nature, a very necessity of life, with them. (Maupassant TOMOS 78- 79).

He further declares that the French can never truly understand the Arabs. His adjectives for an Arab are purely colonial negatives, such as ―unknown, mysterious, cunning, submissive, smiling, [and] impenetrable‖ (Maupassant TOMOS 80-81). These stereotypes are further intensified by these words: ―An Arab, where women are concerned, has the most rigorous standards coupled with the most inexplicable tolerance‖ (qtd. in Goyet 107).

Monsieur Auballe as a colonizer spots Allouma in the tent of his submissive servant, Mohammed, who, according to the colonizer, ―acted the part of a magnanimous servant, who sacrifices himself for his master, even to the extent of giving up the woman whom he had brought into his own tent‖ (Maupassant TOMOS 82). This entering into his tent ―without calling‖ can be interpreted as the colonizer‘s invasion 118 of the colony, and finding therein possessions like Allouma, who has been described by Auballe as:

Her body, which was beautifully white under the ray of light that came in through the raised covering of the tent, appeared to me to be one of the most perfect specimens of the human race that I had ever seen, and most of the women about here are beautiful and tall, and are a rare combination of features and shape. I let the edge of the tent fall in some confusion, and returned home. (Maupassant TOMOS 74)

He makes a resolution to make Allouma ―a kind of slave-mistress, hidden in my house…when the time should come that I no longer cared for her, it would be easy for me to get rid of her in some way or another, for on African soil those sort of creatures almost belong to us, body and soul…‖ (Maupassant TOMOS 78). Thus, she is made captive in his house and given room to rest and sleep where it would be easy for him to sexually exploit her again and again. Days passed by and he developed a strange attachment with her but, for sure, it was not love because that was impossible as she belonged to ―other race…other species…born on a neighboring planet‖ (84). Further, he says that:

I did not love her; no, one does not love the women of that primitive continent. This small, pale blue flower of Northern countries never unfolds between them and us, or even between them and their natural males, the Arabs. They are too near to human animalism, their hearts are too rudimentary, their feelings are not refined enough to rouse that sentimental exaltation in us, which is the poetry of love. Nothing intellectual, no intoxication of thought or feeling is mingled with that sensual intoxication which those charming nonentities excite in us. (Maupassant TOMOS 84).

This deliberate inability of loving women who belong to the ‗primitive continent‘ purely shows the racial and misogynistic attitude of the author. Besides portraying the characters as colonial subjects, this story also depicts these characters in animalistic imagery, which is true of Maupassant‘s most of the female characters of his other stories as well. In ―Allouma‖ the beauty of a woman is linked with nature and ―the desirable animalistic allure of her body is set in contrast to their negative behavior‖ (Goyet 107). 119

The key to understanding the character of Allouma is to know how Maupassant has defined her as an ultimate ―other‖. At the end of the story he turned his attention from pure exoticism (setting of the Algerian desert) to social exoticism, whereby Allouma left her white lover and returned, for a while, to the nomads ―covered with dust, torn and dirty…as if she has been a dog‖ (Maupassant TOMOS 91). Thus, returning to her ―Nomad life of sand and liberty‖ (Maupassant 94) implies, to use Rosi Braidotti‘s terminology, that she became ―the site of multiple, complex, and potentially contradictory sets of experiences, defined by overlapping variables such as class, race, age, lifestyle, sexual preference, and others‖ (qtd. in Thornham 50). Thus she escaped the ‗bound‘ identity and became ‗nomadic‘. The permission was given to her by the Frenchman who was bound to her by his dominating carnal desires. Auballe pitifully finds her in childishness and animal-like caprices, and he speaks of her spirit as ―a vision of a Nomad world, born of a squirrel‘s brain that had leapt from tent to tent‖ (Maupassant TOMOS 80). All these things were strange to the colonial man. Further, he thinks:

Why had she disappeared with that repulsive brute? Why, indeed? It may have been because for practically a whole month the wind had been blowing from the South. A breath of wind! That was reason enough! Did she know, do any of them, even the most introspective of them, know in most cases why they do certain things? No more than a weathercock swinging in the wind. The slightest breeze sways the light vane of copper, iron, or wood, in the same way that some imperceptible influence, some fleeting impression, stirs and guides the fickle fancy of a woman, whether she is from town or country, from a suburb or from the desert. (Maupassant TOMOS 97)

In the above-quoted lines the binary opposition is created: shepherd is described as a ―repulsive brute,‖ paradoxically as the antithesis of the Occidental ―upright‖ man. All these negative attributes are given to her as if to an animal, and besides this her character, according to the Frenchman, already is foreign and unacceptable ―other‖.

Therefore, he finally considers the physical violence as the only powerful tool to control them, whether male or female. He thinks that he might very likely have killed her ―just as one half kills a disobedient dog‖ (Maupassant 94), which is repeated twice 120 in the same paragraph because he says he ―loved her somewhat in the same manner as one loves some very highly bred horse or dog, which it is impossible to replace. She was a splendid animal, a sensual animal, an animal made for pleasure, and which possessed the body of a woman‖ (Maupassant TOMOS 94). But at the end he leaves her free as his possession of Allouma matters hardly to him. For him she was something easy to be ignored or forgotten. Therefore, in this story, the female character Allouma becomes a symbolic representation of the relationship between Algeria and France.

Similarly, in a footnote to ―Marroca‖, a story based on his Algerian experience, Maupassant‘s biased and racist approach to the African people, especially women, whom he considered as wild in sensuality, can be discerned more extremely. His powerful objectification of the people as unintellectual and illiterate renders them as sensual and carnal beings. Hence, the sexuality of these women has been defined by their geographical location. The superior male gaze objectifies their identity as something which is purely associated with carnal and sexual desires. According to Maupassant, as presented in this story, they are madly involved in sensual activities only. Further, he says:

Here people love madly. During the very first days one feels a thrilling ardour, a stimulation, a sudden tension of desire, a tingling right down to the finger-tips, which excite one‘s sexual powers, and all one‘s faculties of physical sensation, to the point of exasperation, form the merest touching of hands to that craving, that shall be nameless, which makes us do so many foolish things… (qtd. in Boyd 127)

Hence, Maupassant‘s animalistic sexual description clearly points out his misogynistic and colonial attitude towards women who are portrayed merely as animals. They are treated merely as things for sexual pleasure. Not only one but all of them are generalized likewise and it is true of Marroca too, the daughter of a Spanish colonist. She is described as:

She was truly a wonderful girl, of a rather animal type, but superb. Her eyes always seemed to be shining with passion; her half-opened mouth, her sharp teeth, even her smile, had something atrociously sensual about them; and her strange breasts, long and straight, with points like pears of flesh, as elastic as if steel springs were concealed in 121

them…No woman‘s body ever burned with such insatiable desires. (qtd. in Boyd 128)

Florence Goyet in his The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre has comprehensively analysed the racial and animalistic imagery that Maupassant has used in his various short stories while presenting the characters of women and poor peasants. Goyet has summed up Maupassant‘s different animalistic and misogynistic images which range from physical, social, cultural, gendered, domestic, racial and colonial. Goyet argues that:

It ranges from descriptions of their physicality (the old peasant ―just like a rat‖; ―What was it that opened it? I could not tell at the first glance. A woman or an ape?‖; [she was] ―the true type of robust peasantry, half brute and half woman […]; [...] the brutal sound of her voice, a sort of moan, or rather a mew‖), to descriptions of their customs (―in the country the useless are obnoxious and the peasants would be glad, like hens, to kill the infirm of their species‖), and to their domestic situation (―the brats were crawling all over […] The two mothers could barely distinguish their products in the heap […] the housewives gathered their offspring to give them their mash, like gooseherds gathering their creatures […] the mother [...] fattening her calf‖).What Maupassant suggests here is a radical difference: peasants belong to a ―different species‖ (to use his own phrase from Allouma). It is not that the peasants are simply different from us; they are expelled from the circle of human beings. (121, parentheses in the original)

He further argues that Maupassant has presented women - either prostitutes or so-called respectable - as bizarre and picturesque. ―Their feelings, ways of life and opinions are all part of an exotic spectacle‖ (119). The critics of that time did not take pains to write against the representation of women, especially the exotic, as she was presented as nothing but an inferior ‗other‘. To this Goyet adds: ―My point is not that these stories shouldn‘t be republished, but that it seems odd that few critics, even today, comment on the brutal ―othering‖ of these characters. This type of extreme and unflattering characterisation is so typical of the short story that it somehow goes unnoticed‖ (122). 122

―Boule de Suif‖, a masterpiece and Maupassant‘s first success, is based on the true story of a prostitute which was told to Maupassant by his step-uncle, Charles Cord‘homme. The heroine of the real story was presumed to be a Rouen courtesan named Adrienne Lagay. It is also said that Maupassant probably met her in a Rouen theatre years after writing the story. It is said that this poor woman died in poverty many years after the death of Maupassant. She had killed herself because she could not endure the wretchedness she had been living in (Steegmuller 107-108). Thus the reality is obvious that she survived only till she could sell her body. When her body failed to satisfy the brutal society, she had to die or be killed by someone. Her pathetic story inspired Maupassant to write this masterpiece story about a prostitute. In the story, Boule de Suif is treated very poorly and is an outcast among the whole crew of passengers. She is exploited both economically and sexually. Being a prostitute, she is considered as morally inferior even though she sacrificed her body for the sake of those people who later accused her. Firstly they forced her to sell herself in order to rescue them and later they began to accuse her of immorality.

The prime consideration of Maupassant in ―Boule de Suif‖ is the rehabilitation of the courtesan whom the bourgeois hypocrite society considers as an evil doer, but her inner nature is shown as pure and innocent. Rene Doumic, a French critic and man of letters, is of the view that this story ―is a challenge calmly flung at all social conventions and proprieties, at bourgeois prudery and fashionable hypocrisy; a sort of comic wager to rehabilitate the courtesan, who is made to incarnate the idea of country, and personify the thought of resistance to the enemy‖ (Doumic 231). This story very simply shows that a prostitute can also be a true patriot. In fact, she possesses more patriotic sentiments than those civilized passengers who are ridiculing her. Conflict and antithesis, which are the two important elements in a good story, can also be discerned in this story. On the one hand, the prostitute is considered bad because of her profession though she is pure at heart; and on the other hand, the bourgeois characters behave basely even if they belonged to so-called civilized classes. They force her to sleep with the Prussian soldier so that they could continue their journey. This contrast between classes and their deeper reality is fore-grounded throughout the story. Maupassant has vilified these characters for their stupidity, cowardice and hypocrisy. Boule de Suif, on the other hand, has been presented as an incarnation of simplicity and sympathy. Florence Goyet has pointed out an important 123 argument about the central antithetical tension. According to him, ―The central antithetical tension contrasts the classic image of the prostitute-pariah with that of the prostitute-patriot‖ (Goyet 69). The central question regarding the women in general and a prostitute in particular, has been tackled in this story: is the prostitute a person capable of having the greatness of soul? When we look for the answer a negative voice comes from the secondary bourgeois characters in the story pronouncing ―no‖; but Maupassant replies boldly, ―yes, and much more than the townsfolk‖ (Goyet 69). Thus, the author has shattered an age-old myth of the conventional prostitute as an object and an embodiment of meek submissive evil by symbolizing Boule de Suif as a truly pure heart and true nationalist, though her profession is something which contradicts the norms of so-called a good society.

Maggie O‘Neill, a renowned scholar in Sociology and Women‘s Studies at Staffordshire University, says that Maupassant‘s ―Boule de Suif‖ shows clearly both ―the ‗moral shame‘ associated with prostitution and the ways in which discourses on ‗bad-girls‘, ‗prostitutes‘, help to maintain and sustain social order and social hierarchies‖ (O‘Neill 196). These social hierarchies are maintained through the representation of social class, gender and morality. Further, the story shows the political, social, sexual and economic double standards that were prevailing during the nineteenth century. Men used to judge women by her ‗virtues‘ and the creation of ‗other‘ would help them to define their own position. Maupassant also represented the inner aspect of ‗good woman‘ in Boule de Suif, though she has been neglected by the passengers with whom she travels to Dieppe. One the one hand, her character has been represented as a sacrificial woman who offers her body in order to buy freedom for others, and on the other hand, the story also highlights the patriarchal system of capitalism in which women and her bodies are considered merely as commodities. They are sold and bought in different markets. Boul de Suif‘s existence is just a commodity for the bourgeois passengers. The feelings of a woman inside her have been totally ignored by them. Therefore, this story points out Maupassant‘s serious and critical insights into gender and class hierarchies, social order and more than anything, the role of the church and gendered prejudices, against all of whom the poor courtesan is pitted (O‘ Neill 197). Her ‗body-object‘ is used as a weak voiceless submissive entity by the patriarchal capitalist bourgeois men and women. O‘Neill says that Maupassant‘s tale can be read as demonstrating very clearly that the 124 prostitute is a submissive female body, ―at once both ‗menace‘ and ‗remedy‘, at the beck and call of the bourgeois body‖ (199). She is despised as ‗other‘ and her existence as ‗nothing‘ is reduced to a mere ‗body-object‘ and a ‗commodity‘. Her sobbing in the darkness acts as a metaphor for her psychic and social alienation. But Maupassant succeeded in presenting her far better than the ‗good‘ women of Rouen.

―Boule de Suif‖ was the Maupassant‘s most successful short story. The beauty of the story is the masterful combination of his favourite themes in a skilful narrative technique. The two favourite themes of Maupassant which were close to his heart are the themes of the humiliation of woman and the theme of the humiliation of France, and these made the story a masterpiece. The former was already fruitful in his other story ―Le Papa de Simon‖. (Steegmuller 109)

Though in the story the heroine is treated sympathetically by the author, yet his belief that ―a career of prostitution has its origin in a woman‘s betrayal,‖ (Steegmuller 109) is almost present in all of his other stories dealing with prostitution. The depiction of the woman characters in his stories has some relevance to Maupassant‘s mother. She was the original source of the theme of woman‘s humiliation, which the author has always tried to depict in all his stories.

The same theme of the rehabilitation of a courtesan and the humiliation of a woman is also presented in ―Madame Tellier‘s Establishment‖, another famous short story by Maupassant. The story is an experiment of the same kind. Like the courtesan in ―Boule de Suif,‖ the central character in the story is also a prostitute whose character becomes the focus of attention throughout the short story. This story was published along with three other famous stories, ―En Famille,‖( A Family Affair) ―Histoire d‘une Fille de Ferme‖ (Story of a Farm Girl) and ―Le Papa de Simon‖ (Simon‘s Father) in May 1881 in Maupassant‘s first volume of fiction entitled La Maison Tellier. The idea of the story was given to Maupassant by his friend who had once noticed an interesting signpost ―Closed because of First Communion‖ while passing a Rouen brothel. It moved Maupassant because it was related to one of his very favourite themes. Maupassant wrote a short story about it; however, he added many scenes to make it more forceful and vivid. For example, the scene of an excursion to visit a village church; the consternation among the male population of Fecamp when the brothel was found closed; train journey of the prostitutes, their gaily-clad march in streets of the town; the gratitude of the priest for their sobs in 125 church; the unseemly behavior of Madame Tellier‘s brother, a respectable carpenter, and finally the hysterical delight of returning back to the brothel. All these scenes have been very carefully built in a well close-knit plot. There is a vivid representation of the life of brothel and some happiest moments of these prostitutes when they left their daily tedious routine and went for an excursion like the other people of the society (Steegmuller 151-52).

In ―Madame Tellier‘s Establishment‖ Maupassant has commented on the social convention, centring on the condition of prostitution, with humour and strange touches of humanism. It is the result of an extraordinary fascination for brothels in nineteenth-century France. In the story the contrast between what is sacred and what is profane is illustrated by the brothel girls‘ exuberant entrance at the country‘s First Communion. According to Harold Bloom, this surprising combination of the sacred and the profane, stable clash between farce and its conjuration, establish an implicit destabilization of bourgeois commonplace images (55). Further, Harold Bloom has discussed the theme of brothel while pointing out the views of Martin Turnell on the Maupassant‘s juxtaposition of the House of God with the House of Love or, in other words, the amalgamation of the sacred and profane. Bloom writes: ―It was an obvious stick to beat the bourgeois, an easy way of exposing their hypocrisy and scoring off the ‗old goats‘ who escaped from their pious, long faced wives for an evening‘s fun among the gilt and the plush‖ (qtd. in Bloom 44).

This reflects the fundamental nihilism of the age. ―The writers imagined that they had got rid of religion. The next step was to get rid of man, to reduce him to a bundle of instincts, to turn love into a commodity which was bought and sold, into the tangle of hairy legs and frilly bloomers among the rumpled sheets that we find in one of Maupassant‘s bolder illustrators‖ (Bloom 44). Binary oppositions such as the House of God and the House of Love; the Cure and Madame; the fragrant open countryside and the hot, fetid, noisy brothel; prostitution and patriotism etc. have been used throughout the story. In Maupassant‘s words, ―there were six or eight of them there, always the same ones, not rakes, but upright men, trades people, young men from the town, and you drank your Chartreuse and teased the girls a bit, or you conversed seriously with Madame, whom everybody respected‖ (TCSSM 54).

In Maupassant‘s fictional world virtue and religion do not go hand in hand. The most common prejudice of the period in which Maupassant wrote was ―un 126 homme qui pratique est un sot, et une femme qui ne pratique pas une gourgandine‖ (a man who practices is a fool, and a woman who does not practice is a strumpet) (Maupassant 41). The quote practically implies that a woman who does practice her religion is virtuous. However, there are exceptions in Maupassant‘s fiction in which prostitutes are endowed with a religious fervour far exceeding than the women of respectable families. Thus, as Bloom has pointed out, the sexuality and religiosity of a woman had a common source ―La religion est une partie du sexe de la femme,‖ (Religion is a part of female sex). Maupassant was quick to draw the clear conclusion: the more ―sexual‖ the woman, the greater her capacity for religious ecstasy (Bloom 50). His prostitute characters such as Bule de Suif and the others in ―Madame Tellier‘s Establishment‖ drive their immense satisfaction from prayers and their uncontrollable weeping during First Communion respectively. Thus, firstly, Maupassant is destroying the conventional notion of a prostitute as immoral and irreligious. Secondly, he has shattered the concept of prostitution by defining it something which is like the other professions of a society by giving a very simple reason:

The prejudice against prostitution, which is so violent and deeply rooted in large towns, does not exist in the country places in Normandy. The peasant simply says: ―It‘s a paying business,‖ and sends his daughter to keep a harem of fast girls, just as he would send her to keep a girls‘ school. (qtd. in Stivale 115)

Maupassant‘s another story ―The Diamond Necklace‖, published in 1884, presents the domestic condition of a housewife in nineteenth-century France. She is completely dependent on her husband and is not supposed to enter into the business world of men. She is restricted to the four walls of her home. The story reveals Mathilde Loisel‘s bourgeois aspirations. Born in the low family of clerks and having no dowry, she is forced to marry Monsieur Loisel, a clerk in the Ministry of Public Instruction. Although she is a pretty and charming woman, yet her birth itself has been described as a mistake as she was born into a family of clerks. However, her unfortunate birth does not hinder her to have rich dreams which she knows that she can never realize. Thus she ‗enriches‘ herself by dreaming high in the midst of her poverty and unsophisticated life. 127

The story starts by introducing a pretty, young girl who is born ―as if through an error of destiny‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 28) because she belongs to a family of clerks. Maupassant in this story deals with the identity of a woman. It is very clearly said at the outset that women in possession of no dowry would remain unknown as if having no existence, ―for women belong to no caste, no race; their grace, their beauty, and their charm serving them in the place of birth and family‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 28).

This story very distinctly portrays the typical social structure and culture of France during the late nineteenth-century in which women were fond of acquisitions in their households, and they also possessed more aesthetic sense than men. The protagonist of this story, Mathilde Loisel, is like one of them who ―felt that she was made for them‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 28). In order to attend an invitation, Mathilde borrows a diamond necklace from her childhood friend Madame Forestier. Unfortunately, she loses the diamond necklace in the party. To return the diamond necklace to her friend, they buy a new diamond necklace which costs them their ten years of extreme poverty and sufferings.

After a long time, one Sunday Mathilde meets her friend Madame Forestier who is surprised by the transformation of Mathilde‘s appearance. On explaining her long saga of losing the necklace, replacing it, and working for ten years to repay the debts, Mathilde is shocked by the fact that the original necklace was just a costume jewellery and not worthy of anything. Thus the story ends in a shocking revelation for both the characters and the readers as well. Also known as ―whip-crack‖ or ―O. Henry‖ ending, this surprise ending of the story gives a shock to the readers who would have never imagined such a fact. The ending shatters the illusion, reveals that the miserable ten years of Mathilde‘s life was just the result of a small mistake and could have been avoided if only she had been honest with her friend.

The use of irony is the main weapon in this story. ―Nothing escapes,‖ said Agnes Rutherford Riddell about Maupassant‘s use of irony, ―…all classes, all conditions, all situations, and all events touched by them come alike under the lash. In expressing itself this irony assumes various forms. Sometimes it manifests itself in circumstances. People are constantly being duped or disenchanted‖ (Riddel 34). The irony is that Mathilde spends years paying off a replacement that was actually a worthless necklace. This is just one instance of irony evident in the story. Another 128 irony is in the fact that Mathilde has borrowed the necklace to be seen as more beautiful but it rather made her totally opposite when she lost it. Also, she had borrowed the necklace to give the appearance of having more money that actually she had not only to lose what she then had.

This twisted ending of the story does not come out of nothing. The whole story from the beginning to the very surprise ending weaves the deep antitheses and tension, which is succeeded by the surprise ending. The antithesis and tension between two worlds organized the whole test. ―On the other hand, there is the life of elegance and luxury in the dreams of Mme Loisel—and in the actual world of her friend—which is epitomized by the necklace‖ (Goyet 46 ). Here she becomes a weapon for Maupassant to attack pride and ―manipulates his audience so that it finds yearnings at first as insipid and selfish, later as tragic and possibly heroic‖ (Bloom 61). The ending unveils all the hidden values; by only one twisted step, all the struggle of ten years is reduced to nothing - her dream is shattered by one beam of reality. Franck O‘Connor notes how remarkable it is that the reader of short stories never thinks about the future of the characters. But Andre Vail is of the view that the trick ending ―balances‖ and carries equal weight with the rest of the text.

Mathilde Loisel is an example of the nineteenth-century French version of a desperate housewife. Being a woman in a man‘s world she has no control over it. Although she has all the ―womanly virtues‖ - she is charming, graceful and beautiful - in order to be desirable, she is restricted to four walls of the house and she ―never go[es] out‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 29) to see the official world outside. She is a dissatisfied housewife who spends her days weeping about how boring and shabby her life is.

Another concern of the story is to portray the economic structure of society in which woman has no place. In this context, reading the story from a feminist framework is significant in that the economic independence has been one of the foremost and basic demands of feminists. Economic equality can emancipate women from other forms of oppression and exploitation. Even woman‘s sexual exploitation is rooted in economic inequality and deprivation. As noted by Simone de Beauvoir, ―Her social oppression [including sexuality exploitation] is the consequence of her economic oppression‖ (64). ―The Diamond Necklace‖ also highlights that women were always treated unequally, particularly in economic matters. The economic inequality makes their 129 identity non-existent. Woman has been dependent on man throughout history and therefore, if she has to progress, she ―must have money and a room of her own‖ (Woolf 4). The title ―The Diamond Necklace‖ itself refers to the wealth which is only in the hands of men. Maupassant‘s various other stories depict, in the same manner, the women‘s struggle for identity and against their economic and sexual exploitations.

Another short story by Maupassant ―The Story of a Farm-Girl‖ narrates the pathetic situation of a woman called Rose who works as a servant on a farm. Although she is more powerful than her lover, still she is forsaken, deserted and ill- treated by him. Woman, even though strong enough to defend herself, is ill-treated and deceived in one way or other. Rose‘s lover avoids her ―which made her sad and anxious; especially when she found that she was pregnant‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 40). She was deceived by her lover in a fake promise of marriage. When she proposed marriage, the answer that she received from him was: ―Oh, if a man were to marry all the girls with whom he has made a slip, he would have more than enough to do‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 41). In this story, Maupassant has portrayed a real picture of an unequal relationship between man and woman in which woman is always threatened. The sin which was committed by both was blamed on her part. Thus the thought, ―suppose people were to know,‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 42) would strangulate her.

Later, the child she gave birth to was extremely weak because it was born of only seven months. She left it to a neighbour, but she could not suppress the motherly affection. The motherly emotions of a woman are illustrated by Maupassant as:

But then, in her heart, which had been wounded so long, there arose something like brightness, an unknown love for that frail little creature which she had left behind her, but there was fresh suffering in that very love, suffering which she felt every hour and every minute, because she was parted from the child. What pained her most; however, was a mad longing to kiss it, to press it in her arms, to feel the warmth of its little body against her skin. She could not sleep at night; she thought of it the whole day long, and in the evening, when her work was done, she used to sit in front of the fire and look at it intently, like people do whose thoughts are far away. (Maupassant, TCSSM 43)

She worked hard on a farm and ―under her direction the farm prospered wonderfully and five miles round people talked of ‗Master Vallin‘s servant‘‖ 130

(Maupassant, TCSSM 41). Maupassant has shown the different roles played by a woman in a society, but at every stage she is violated. Firstly, we see she is violated sexually by a servant who betrays her. Secondly, she is economically dispossessed by her master, even if she worked more than others in his farm. She lost her identity and is known by her master‘s name.

The most shocking and ridiculous thing to her was a marriage proposal by the farmer, ―a stout, jovial, obstinate man of forty-five, who had lost two wives‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 45). Acquiring her ―would be a capital bargain for him, as he thus bound a woman to himself who would certainly bring him more than if she had the best dowry in the district‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 45). She began to experience the frightful nightmares. She tried a lot to protect herself from the hands of the cruel farmer, but she couldn‘t. Thus in the tragic saga of female oppression, one more chapter is written about the violation and rape of Rose. Rose did not reject the farmer‘s marriage proposal. She was so broken that she passively accepted everything that was happening in her life. ―She did not reply, for what could she say? She did not resist, for what could she do?‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 48). She came to know that her resistance could not bring any positive change. This lack of resistance in the female characters is Maupassant‘s weakness. He has depicted them as passive victims. They lack the rebellion and resistance which one finds in some of the characters of Sadat Hasan Manto.

Her marriage with the farmer (her master) made her feel as if ―she were in a pit with inaccessible edges, from which she could never get out, and all kinds of misfortunes remained hanging over her head, like huge rocks, which would fall on the first occasion‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 48). Her child was both cause of misfortune and happiness to her on the earth. Her husband treated her as if she was a beast. His attitude towards her was purely patriarchal. For him, she was like a child bearing machine. She was told that if she could not bear a child, then she was of no use, and she was to be thrown out. ―When a man takes a wife, he does not want to be left alone with her until the end of his days. That is what I have against you. When a cow has no calves, she is not worth anything, and when a woman has no children, she is also not worth anything‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 49).

The whole story illustrates this unequal system of our society, and Maupassant was deeply troubled by these social evils and he highlighted this dark truth which 131 compels the readers to ponder over it. So, the relationship between the wife and husband signifies the relationship of dominance and subjugation, the binary opposition of man and woman. In this binary opposition, man is always dominating and authoritarian. Such social institutions have been structured throughout history to subjugate woman in different forms and marriage being among one. In marriage, one of the important roles that a wife plays is what Foucault calls the ―serious function of reproduction,‖ (9) through which her identity is constructed and defined. This is also the concern of Maupassant‘s famous story ―Useless Beauty‖ (L‘Inutile Beaute), in which Comte de Mascaret has married ―a penniless and lovely girl‖. His love for her is materialistic and his attitude towards her is misogynistic. Out of jealousy and to keep her wife at home, he has made her a slave of maternity. In just a period of eleven years, she has given birth to his seven children.

The author has focused on the unbalanced relationship between a husband and a wife, and how the marriage as a social institution becomes a tool of oppression. However, the story narrates a tale of resistance more than the oppression. Just out of his jealousy of her beauty, her husband made her suffer the pains of deliberate and forced childbearing for seven years, which she avenges only by saying to her husband that ―Your conduct has made me hate you and I have had my revenge against you. I swear solemnly by the heads of my children that one of them is not yours - you shall never know which!‖ (qtd. in De Bury 29). This kept away her husband from loving all his children because he was unaware of which one is not by him. The thought would always suffocate him. The suffering he experienced is so evident that the wife is touched and moved with pity, and says: ―I see that you have suffered enough. I assure you I am now speaking the truth. All these children are yours. But had I not acted in this way, I should by this time be the mother of four more! Women are members of a civilized world, and we decline to be treated as mere females to repeople society!‖ (De Bury 29).

This is a story of woman‘s resistance, resistance to the longstanding role that women played on the orders of their ―brutal masters‖. Countess de Mascaret, a victim of childbearing and maternity, resists the oppression. Her identity was reduced to procreation only and forced to bore children by her husband, not because of fatherly affection, rather he was jealous of her beauty. But, at last, she resisted this forced childbearing. She says: 132

No, but I will no longer be the victim of the hateful penalty of maternity, which you have inflicted on me for eleven years! I wish to live like a woman of the world, as I have the right to do, as all women have the right to do…. No, I am not; I am thirty, and I have had seven children, and we have been married eleven years, and you hope that this will go on for ten years longer, after which you will leave off being jealous. (Maupassant, TCSSM 110)

She further says:

You loved your children as victories, and not because they were of your own blood. They were victories over me, over my youth, over my beauty, over my charms, over the compliments which were paid me, and over those who whispered round me, without paying them to me. (Maupassant, TCSSM 111-12)

On this he beats her, seizes her wrist with savage brutality and squeezes it so violently that she becomes quiet. Now her husband asserts his power over her and his children in following words:

I love my children, do you hear? What you have just told me is disgraceful in a mother. But you belong to me; I am master - your master. I can exact from you what I like and when I like - and I have the law on my side...You see that I am the master and the stronger. (Maupassant, TCSSM 112)

This story also sharply distinguishes the roles of man and woman, one being the master and possessor of the other. Here Maupassant has highlighted the dominant attitude of a man who thought his wife as his property. He acts as her master because he thinks he is stronger (physically) than her. He treats her brutally, subjects her to an extreme torment. But she does not fear him, and is ready to face anything and is almost triumphant. She avenged herself for her past sufferings which transformed a ―normal woman into a mere machine for maternity‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 116).

In the third section of the story there is some philosophical discussion about the man-woman relationship, their beastly acts and God‘s choice of instilling this kind of nature in human beings. ―God only created coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, and who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all 133 the ugliness and all they want of power of human decrepitude‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 116). However, at the end of the story, she confesses to him the reality that all of their children are by him; there is no one illegitimate among them. She had told a lie only to teach her husband a lesson. When her husband asked her that how could a mother speak like that? She replies:

I do not at all feel that I am the mother of children who have never been born; it is enough for me to be the mother of those that I have, and to love them with all my heart. I am - we are - women who belong to the civilized world, Monsieur, and we are no longer, and we refuse to be, mere females who restock the earth. (Maupassant, TCSSM 120).

Thus the story ends on a happy note. She made him realize how it was to suffer for long period of eleven years. De Burry illustrates the feelings of a changed husband and the emergence of his love for his wife thus:

She spoke he felt instinctively that the woman who thus addressed him was not made solely for the sake of perpetuating the race, but that she was as well a strange, unfathomable outcome of all the complicated desires amassed through centuries; that she had diverged from the primitive and divine intention of her existence, and was developing a mystic and indescribable beauty, such as we dream of, surrounded by all the poetry and ideal luxury with which civilization endows her, a statue of flesh, appealing to the senses and yet ministering to the mind. Emotions filled the husband's breast far more stirring than the old simple form of love.‖ (De Bury 30)

Therefore, this story while talking about the social injustice of woman highlights various patriarchal laws which govern her under different ‗fixed‘ roles she plays in a society, through which her character is judged as ‗natural‘ or ‗unnatural‘. These roles that are assigned to her in society have been talked of by Mary Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a groundbreaking book on the equality and rights of women. Wollstonecraft says that these fixed roles and laws are not applicable to man, as he is the one who creates them and sets boundaries meant only for woman. The word ‗natural‘ as ‗the most ideologically loaded‘ (Robbins 26) word is only a ‗customary‘ word. Natural things will come out naturally, and by force or threat, one cannot expect someone to do things naturally or behave 134 naturally. In Maupassant‘s story ―Useless Beauty‖, the husband has restricted her wife‘s individuality only to childbearing, literary transformed her into a child producing machine, which often in a patriarchal society is considered something as ‗natural‘.

A sort of resistance, which is often lacking in Maupassant‘s short stories, against the man-domination can be best seen also in his story ―The Will‖. Madame de Courcils, a poor, little, and timid woman, whom her husband has married for the sake of her fortune is shackled by her brute husband. He treats her very cruelly and her status is like a servant in his house. This tragic story is narrated by her third son. He is her illegitimate son by her lover. He says that ―My mother, Madame de Courcils… Her whole life was a continual martyrdom. Of a loving, delicate mind, she was constantly ill-treated by the man who ought to have been my father, one of those boors called country gentlemen‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 563)‖. This story focuses on the character of ―the poor, neglected, unhappy woman‖ who revolts and takes revenge against her husband after she dies. She leaves a will and when the family and a lawyer read it, they get shocked. According to it, her lover and the son by him would be the only owners of all her property. The dramatic climax of her revolt is described as:

It was a grand, dramatic, yet burlesque and surprising scene, brought about by the posthumous revolt of a dead woman, by a cry for liberty from the depths of her tomb, on the part of a martyred woman who had been crushed by a man's habits during her life, and, who, from her grave, uttered a despairing appeal for independence. (Maupassant, TCSSM 564)

This aspect of Maupassant‘s portrayal of female characters presents the exploitation of women by the powerful man-dominant ideology of the society and its social institutions whereby the existence of a woman is rendered into nothing. In contrast to this, there is another aspect of Maupassant‘s female characterization where he has portrayed those woman characters that are ―known for their vanity, shrewdness and insincerity‖, and for this, Maupassant is rather ―consistent and undivided‖ (Surendran 115). He targets the aristocrat and the bourgeoisie people of the nineteenth century France, and these stories especially highlight the misogynist attitude of the author. This attitude of Maupassant to the female sex has been also dealt in his famous novel Bel-Ami. Based on the powerful theme of sex-war, this novel presents 135 the feminine love that was generally forbidden by bourgeois conventions ―where most of Duroy‘s triumphs are the triumph of the male at the expense of the female. We find that the male always wins the last battle‖ (Surendran 118). So, the superiority of male is powerfully prevalent in Maupassant‘s stories as well as in his novels. In this context, Female sexuality in some of his stories is structured through the male point of view that is commonly known as ‗male gaze‘, and through which female characters are always depicted as sexual and carnal creatures, and their identity is reduced to mere ‗other‘. In de Beauvoir‘s words, men are not described in such a way because there are no women to proclaim this truth (244). Thus, alongside the other male authors of the period, Maupassant too has objectified women, and their bodies have become a site of the male gaze on which his masculine desire and fantasies are inscribed.

Just as the vanity of a woman and its consequences are shown in ―Necklace‖, similarly the wickedness of a woman is revealed in his story ―On Horseback‖. In this story, an old woman, Madame Simon, gets knocked down by Hector de Gribelin, a clerk at the Navy office, in an accident. Maupassant depicted her as a professional cheater who makes a ―living by making the life of others miserable‖. Her character is portrayed in such a way that she does not attract our sympathy rather her cruel nature, a pretender of the fake accident, makes us think of a woman who makes use of others in deception. K. V. Surendran has compared her with a character in Kamala Das‘s story ―Amma‖ which tells the story of an old woman who is knocked down by a black car. But the question is why has Maupassant portrayed female characters like her? This question of why women are stereotyped as wicked and deceitful, sensual and destructive have been closely linked by Surendran with ―Maupassant‘s obsession with flesh, which sometimes borders on sexual mania‖ (122). According to Surendran, women in Maupassant‘s stories serve a double purpose in that they are used as tools for the destruction of fathers and husbands to avenge his own mother. Further, in this context, he quotes Martin Turnell‘s observation that ―His foolish mother used to boast that after a chaste youth he had his first mistress at sixteen. It was the start of the long and frantic promiscuity that led to his downfall‖ (122; Turnell 199). Further, Surendran has made an important observation that Maupassant‘s female characters are types than individuals and his stories as the representation of the nineteenth-century French society with double standards towards women. However, in some of his 136 stories he has criticized the female exploitation by powerful institutions, including religion. Maupassant has criticized the religion as a major power-controlling institution. In this context, his story ―In the Moonlight‖ very clearly demonstrates how a priest exploits common people, especially downtrodden women in the name of religion.

In the very first line of the story, the narrator calls a priest, Abbe Marignan, the ‗Soldier of God,‘ which is a kind of satire on him; because he claims that ―All his beliefs were fixed, with never a waiver. He thought that he understood God thoroughly, that he penetrated His designs, His wishes, His intentions‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 51). If he has a firm belief in God, then why does he despise women? He believes that God has created everything for a definite cause and nothing is unimportant, yet he loathes women for their existence. He often repeats the words of Christ, ―Woman, what have I to do with thee?‖ and he would also add, ―One would almost say that God himself was ill-pleased with that particular work of his hands‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 51). The immensity of his hatred for women is such that he considers them ―child twelve times unclean…She was the temptress, who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her damnable work; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, and mysteriously troublous. And even more than her poisonous beauty, he hated her loving soul‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 51). Thus, the story presents the horrific image of a woman created by society, particularly by these ―Soldiers of God‖. Men like the priest think that ―God had only created woman to tempt man and to test him. Man should not approach her without those precautions for defense which he would take, and the fears he would cherish, near an ambush. Woman, indeed, was just like a trap, with her arms extended and her lips open toward a man.‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 51)

Further, in the story, the priest is given various roles, such as that ―of a father, of a teacher, of a keeper of souls‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 52), and he applies all his powers on his niece. However, at the end of the story we find his mind completely changed. Therefore, Maupassant, an astute observer of society, has only highlighted the social and sexual complexities of his times which rendered woman as horrible being and man is warned to remain distant and safe from her traps – this is the trope of woman as a temptress. He has emphasized the misogynist attitude of men towards women in male-dominated society. 137

Maupassant‘s irony can be seen at its zenith when he criticizes priests or some vicars, depicting their misogynistic attitude towards women. One of the examples is his introduction about the Reverend William Greenfield in the beginning of his story ―Jeroboam‖. He writes:

Anyone who said, or even insinuated, that the Reverend William Greenfield vicar of St. Sampson‘s, Tottenham, did not make his wife Anna perfectly happy, would certainly have been very malicious. In their twelve years of married life he had honored her with twelve children, and could anybody ask more of a saintly man? (Maupassant, TCSSM 293)

The ironical tone is obvious. The vicar is considered a saintly person because he has the wealth of twelve children. Even though his wife is not beautiful, yet she is a ‗model among wives and paragon among mothers‘ because she is endowed with the invaluable virtues. Her body, though the ―inconceivable irony of nature‖, was at the same time ―thin and flabby, wooden and chubby, without either the elegance of slimness or the rounded curves of stoutness‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 294). The subjugation of the wife is also presented in ironical terms when she says she would content herself by praying fervently to God that ―He would inspire her husband with the desire to begin a second series of the Twelve Tribes‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 294). But the vicar deceives her after twelve years and considers her impure. Now she crazily waits for him for four years, and William continues to exert his power over others as well. ―[He] left his wife and, as had been his habit for four years, went to make love to Polly, the servant‖ (Maupassant 296). He named his wife as Jazebel and silenced her by saying that ―I only regret that I have twelve times mingled my blood with your impure blood‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 295). So, this story further exemplifies the resentment towards women, thereby revealing the misogynistic attitudes in nineteenth-century France.

Another story by Maupassant titled ―Monsieur Parent‖ deals with the family relationship of its eponymous central character. Monsieur Parent, a noble and extremely simple man, is ill-treated by his unfaithful wife. In this story Maupassant has portrayed the character of a wife, Harriett, as completely opposite to the women characters of his other stories. She has been shown as cruel, unsympathetic and unfaithful. Some autobiographical elements, for example, the madness of Monsieur 138

Parent can be related to Maupassant‘s own illness, and also the descriptive scenes of open sea, dark jungle, and horizons of the sky in the story can be paralleled to the author‘s life. Through the story the author has fragmented the conventional image of a woman who is submissive, passive, loyal, pure, innocent, weak etc. By portraying her as unfaithful and unsympathetic, the character of Harriett emerges as a powerful woman against the dominant structure of the society.

The depiction of woman as a source of evil and degeneration was a part of the common theme that was prevailing in much of the misogynist literature in the second half of the nineteenth century. Maupassant too has employed the same misogynistic stereotypes for women in his stories ―Babette‖. The eponymous character is very pretty and beautiful with deep blue attractive eyes. At the age of ten she was sexually violated by her own father, and at thirteen, she was forcefully sent to ―the house of correction for vagabondages and debauchery‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 130). She had continuously struggled with the difficult situations. She had been a servant in the neighbourhood for about twenty years, ―frequently changing her situations and being nearly everywhere her employer‘s mistress‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 130).

Maupassant‘s portrayal of the character of Babette shows how women were considered as fickle, unfaithful and also destructive and a source of degeneration in the nineteenth-century literature. The following description of Babette in the story illustrates it further:

She had ruined several families without getting any money herself, and without gaining any definite position. A shopkeeper had committed suicide on her account and a respectable young fellow had turned thief and incendiary, and had finished at the hulks. She had been married twice, and had twice been left a widow, and for ten years, until she was fifty, she had been the only courtesan in the district. (Maupassant, TCSSM 130)

Similarly, the character of Harriet in Maupassant‘s another story ―Miss Harriet,‖ is called ―ridiculous and lamentable‖. However, the author appears as a defender of a type known as ‗ridiculous‘, and it is in this story that critics have seen the symbol of author‘s ―compassion‖ for his characters. Maupassant has shown in this story, as quoted by Goyet in a footnote, ―a sensibility and a sensuality that are not 139 absent from the rest of the works, but are here particularly visible‖ (125). In short, he has painted a true picture of Miss Harriet:

She was, in fact, one of those people of exalted principles, one of those opinionated puritans of whom England produces so many, one of those good and insupportable old women who haunt the tables d‘hôte of every hotel in Europe, who spoil Italy, poison Switzerland, render the charming cities of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carry everywhere their fantastic manias, their petrified vestal manners, their indescribable toilets and a certain odor of India rubber, which makes one believe that at night they slip themselves into a case of that material. When I meet one of these people in a hotel I act like birds which see a manikin in a field. (Maupassant, TCSSM 184-85)

Here Maupassant‘s female characters contrast with Manto‘s female characters. Manto‘s prostitute female characters are not described thus and they do not ruin families. They are helpless downtrodden people with whom Manto would sympathize. Maupassant, on the other hand, has portrayed a prostitute (or woman) as conventional Eve who has been considered as a symbol of temptation. She has been described as a woman of destruction. Her beauty has been compared with the most beautiful women in history. Her eyes have been compared with the eyes of Cleopatra, Diana of Poitiers, Ninon de L‘Enchlos, ―all the queens of love who were adored when they were growing old, must have had eyes like hers. A woman who has such eyes can never grow old. But if Babette lives to be a hundred, she will always be loved as she has been, and as she is‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 130).

One often confronts these social structures which create binaries in Maupassant‘s stories. For example, one of his stories, ―A Peculiar Case‖, narrates the story of a ―Pretty, thin, blonde and confident‖ Mlle Laurine d‘Estelle, who is born with ―a full knowledge of life and of feminine tricks‖. She seems to be ―destined by fate to play with and deceive others‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 446). She is married to Captain de Fontenne who is described as ―One of those men who invariably become either a saint or a nihilist, in whom ideas install themselves as absolute mistresses, whose beliefs are inflexible, whose resolutions are not to be shaken‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 442). The image of woman as temptress and deceptive is further complicated in his other stories such as ―The Signal‖ and ―A philosopher‖. In the former, 140

Maupassant portrays the life of a prostitute who does this job to deceive her husband. In the latter, the author has presented woman as the ‗horrible beauty‘. She is shown as sensual, horrible upper-class fickle, conniving against her husband. She is described as a woman who has ―just married a third time‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 400) and has trapped men by her beauty and killed her husbands by ―her death-giving kisses‖. This story further illustrates how women, especially prostitutes were thought as the source of all degeneration. Being presented as the ‗terrible woman‘, she identifies herself as she wishes; she is not ruled, rather she rules. Similarly, in another story titled ―Woman‘s Wiles‖, he described how women ―play these tricks with incredible simplicity, astonishing audacity, and unparalleled ingenuity. They play tricks from morning till night, and they all do it - the most virtuous, the most upright, the most sensible of them, [while] man has always idiotic fits of obstinacy and tyrannical desires. A husband is continually giving ridiculous orders in his own house‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 414).

Maupassant has depicted various layers and aspects of his woman characters. Though she performs different roles in a society, yet she is only known for her ‗constructed‘ sexual acts. Her importance as a whole and her identity as a human being are neglected. Maupassant‘s negative portrayal of female characters continues in his another story ―A Cock Crowed‖. This story reminds of the courtly love and chivalry of the Middle Ages. Mam Bertha D‘avancelles in the story is depicted as an infidel who though married flirts with her friend, Baron Joseph de Croissard, who in the honour of her love does ―fetes and shooting‖. He is brave and courageous. Here, like other stories, she is presented as fickle, temptress and cunning. Her body is presented as: ―One noticed the smell of damp earth in the air, of the naked earth, like one scents the odour of the bare skin when a woman‘s dress falls off her, after a ball.‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 132).

If the callousness of a woman is depicted in ―A Cock Crowed‖, Maupassant‘s ―The Father‖ presents the story of Louise who is virtuous and keeps herself away from any kind of shame. She faces violence from her arrogant and proud lover. After being his mistress for many years, she is deserted and ignored by him. She gives birth to his child, but still he does not pay any heed to her. Her life becomes hell for many years. Lastly, it is only after ten years that she confesses her miseries to her new husband, Francois Tessier, who is very noble and gentle. He accepts her even after 141 knowing all her past, about her previous lover and their child. Therefore, contrary to ―A Cock Crowed‖, this story presents a very passive, virtuous, meek and exploited woman character who mirrors the conventional character of ―Angel in the House‖.

In ―A Family‖ two childhood friends, George and Simon, live together until Simon gets married. After fifteen years Simon meets his childhood friend George and his wife. His wife is described as ―little, thin, insipidly fair girl, with her weak hands, her light, vacant eyes, and her clear, silly voice who was exactly like a hundred thousand marriageable dolls‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 109). Further, she is portrayed as without intellect, without any of those things which constitute a woman. In short, she is a mother, a stout, commonplace mother, a human layer and broodmare, a machine of flesh which procreates, without mental care save for her children and her housekeeping book (Maupassant, TCSSM 210). It is important to call attention to the language that Maupassant has used to describe the woman in the story. She is described as if she is a machine. She only knows how to procreate. Her image is blurred out from the human affair. Therefore, the picture of a woman in this story is created like of a child breeding machine, and of not a human being.

Another image constructed by Maupassant is of a woman who feels happy and free when she is divorced. Marchioness de Rennedon is one among them who is ―sleeping alone and tranquil, the happy and profound sleep of divorced women‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 227). This is another image of women presented by Maupassant in ―The Signal‖ in which a divorced woman is considered as ―a free woman‖; free from the marital bondage, free from the social conventions, free from the clenches of their husbands. They sleep alone, but tranquil and happy. In this story, married life is depicted as a prison for the woman from which she wants to get rid of.

An important and unique aspect of a woman is dealt in another story ―A Passion‖ by Maupassant. This story basically revolves around some characters that are torn between duty and love, and this complexity of in-between-ness is prevalent throughout the story. At the outset, the story briefly introduces the passionate Madame Poincot who is in love with a soldier, Jean Renoldi, and leaves her family for him, although she is regarded as ―the very type of a virtuous, uncorrupted woman - so upright that no man had ever dared to think of her‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 491-92). However, her lover cares little about her sacrifices. For six months ―she loved him with an unbridled, panting love‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 492) but Renoldi wants to 142 leave her. She becomes mad after him and poisons herself near death. After the critical period of their break up, they meet again and live together happily for some time. At the end, her ex-husband asks Renoldi to send her back to her family because her daughters are suffering. Renoldi agrees, and that hurts her more. Thus she leaves both of them by saying scornful words: ―You are a pair of wretches‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 494).

The husband-wife relationship has been presented by Maupassant in his short story ―The Orderly‖. The Colonel Limousin reads a confessional letter of his dead wife, which reveals her secret relationship with her lover and the intrigue of Philippe. The story illustrates the passionate love of a woman‘s heart and its fears as well. In this story, Colonel‘s wife has a lover whom she meets on an Isle by swimming across a lake, though she also regrets deceiving her husband. One day their servant comes to know about her affair and he starts blackmailing her. She becomes his victim. She fears her husband so much that she commits suicide by drowning herself in the same lake which would take her close to her lover. She could not do anything but to embrace the death. She knew that nobody will listen or believe her. Therefore she cries and utters her anguish thus:

We are so weak, we women; we lose our heads more easily than you do. And then, when a woman once falls, she always falls lower and lower. Did I know what I was doing? I understood only that one of you two and I were going to die -- and I gave myself to this brute. (Maupassant, TCSSM 501)

―The False Gems‖ talks about a perfect type of ―virtuous woman‖ (the term is often used in Maupassant‘s stories), in which a young lady is poor whose father died a few months ago. She gets married to M. Lantin and lives a happy life. When he does not find any reason to blame her, he starts to hate ―her love of the theatre and a taste for false jewellery‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 523). She used to be quite simple without any flamboyant ornamentation, but later she starts to ornament her ears with huge rhinestones which glitter and sparkle like real diamonds. Later, the sudden death of the wife breaks her husband‘s heart. His hair turns grey in a month. Everything in his house seems a disease for him. As a poor man, having nothing to feed his empty stomach, he finally decides to sell his wife‘s false jewellery. At the jewellery shop he comes to know that all these were real. By selling all jewellery, he now possesses two 143 thousand francs and becomes a rich man. He marries another virtuous woman but one with a violent tempers which causes him much sorrow. The riches made him forget his first wife. Moreover, the story also points out at Maupassant‘s cynical attitude towards women who have evil secrets that are unknown to their husbands. Therefore, the story also describes the portrayal of the fickle character of women, further refereeing to the common theme in late nineteenth-century fiction. Another example of the same kind of representation can be seen in Maupassant‘s ―The Log‖ in which a woman is presented as fickle and deceiving and she develops an amours love behind her husband. She is described as ―little, silly, wrong-headed, cunning woman, who was no doubt terribly sensual, for whom her husband was already not sufficient‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 618). Similar to the Shakespeare‘s famous line ―frailty thy name is women‖, Maupassant also describes her as: ―Oh! Female brain, here indeed you show yourself!‘ (Maupassant, TCSSM 618).

However, a note of sympathetic attitude towards an oppressed woman can be seen in Maupassant‘s ―Bertha‖ which presents a ―poor creature who is living there must never see what is going on outside. She is a mad woman, rather an idiot, what you Normans would call a Niente” (Maupassant, TCSSM 598). The story is narrated by her doctor who knows her from the very childhood. She grew up into a superb woman but was disabled otherwise. She even failed to recognize her own mother. Maupassant has used a lot of animal vocabulary to describe this poor creature. For example, her emitting low cries when she laughs and her voice are compared to the twitter of birds; her mournful cries are like that of the howling of a dog. Moreover, like an animal, she is fond of rolling on the grass. Due to the affection of her parents and care of the doctor, she gradually gains her mental capability and shows a little progress. She eventually becomes able to discern the taste of food and could spread hands to choose it; she begins to understand the clock and its different hours which symbolized particular activities. The parents worry about her grown-up beauty and decide to get her married. They think that the motherhood will bring a definite change in her. Thus, she is married to Monsieur Gaston du Boys de Lucelles, a scapegrace from a good family, who, after having ―spent all that he has inherited from his father, and having incurred debts by all kinds of doubtful means, has been trying to discover some other way of obtaining money‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 602). The marriage turns out to be a successful experiment with Bertha living in animal-like contentment. ―She 144 loved him with her whole body and with all her being, to the very depths of her poor, weak soul, and with all her heart, the poor heart of some grateful animal‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 602).

Her husband, however, soon grows tired with the ―ardent, beautiful, dumb creature, and did not spend more than an hour a day with her, thinking it sufficient to devote his nights to her, and she began to suffer in consequence‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 602). The clocks made her life miserable. She would wait for him from morning to evening; she could not sleep without him at the home and he, on the other side, would spend days and nights with friends in clubs and bars. ―He began to be afraid of this amorous and jealous, half-witted woman, and flew into a rage, like brutes do; and one night he even went so far as to strike her…‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 603). She was caged in the house where she was waiting for her husband always looking at the clocks. Every strike of the second would make her gloomy. She became completely mad by the negligence of her husband.

This pathetic story of the poor woman demonstrates Maupassant‘s acute psychological understanding and deep study of insane people. Through his keen observation, Maupassant has described the wretched life of a woman who could have gained her rational powers if only her husband had supported her.

Viteska, another unfortunate character of Maupassant‘s story ―The Odalisque of Senichou‖, is a vigorous, voluptuous, handsome girl of eighteen, the only daughter of the poor but honest people who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow (Maupassant, TCSSM 627). She is one of the few virtuous women among the Maupassant‘s female characters. She is deceived by a fake merchant. Being innocent and pious she did not yield to the fake promises of the merchant at first, but finally she becomes the prey of his evil eyes. She expresses herself thus:

―I will not listen to anything; because I am poor, you think it will be easy for you to seduce me.‖ Viteska exclaimed; ―but I am as virtuous as I am poor, and I should despise any position which I had to buy with my shame.‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 628)

As it has been said that ―a respectable girl is easily robbed of her virtue‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 629), the same happened to her. Her parents agreed to marry her to the fake merchant who introduced himself as Ireneus Krisapolis, a merchant from Smyma. He promised Viteska‘s parents that he would write them soon as they 145 would reach to Smyma. But they did not receive any letter or communication even after more than three months had passed since their marriage. The parents reported to a police station who after investigation informed them that there existed no merchant by this name in Smyma. Actually, the merchant is a flesh trader. He sells Viteska to an old Jewish profligate who was only half alive. But fortunately, she came in the hands of Pasha and married to him. She came to be known as Sarema and came in possession of a fortune. She avenged the fake merchant. ―The odalisque's only reply was a laugh, in which rang all the cruelty of an insulted woman‘s deceived heart‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 631).

This story, therefore, very aptly shows Maupassant‘s sympathy for those poor and virtuous girls who have been deceived by wrong promises of marriage and hope for a better future. This story also shows Maupassant‘s criticism of flesh trade. Further, at the end of the story, it highlights the rebellious aspect of Maupassant‘s female characters.

After a close textual analysis of Maupassant‘s select short stories in this chapter, his representation of female sexuality in different colours has been found having a deep connection with his personality and family background in addition to the overall attitude of the period. As a matter of fact, one example is pertinent to note here that besides being a master of short story writing, Maupassant wrote some plays as well. In 1875 and 1877, he composed two plays in which he himself performed. A la feuille de rose: maison turque was one of them in which he performed the role of a bisexual female prostitute. As reported by Edmond de Goncourt, his play was attended by Flaubert who had remarked: "Oui, c'est tres frais" (Yes, it‘s very cool) (qtd. in Stivale 57). Stivale points out that this amalgamation of performances, texts, and commentaries of homosocial bonds typify the complexity of Maupassant‘s own sexuality. Further, Maupassant‘s complexity of his sexuality was aggravated by his ―own temptations of cross-dressing and the fascination with female partners cross- dressed as males‖ (57). Stivale further exemplifies Maupassant‘s ―genital consciousness‖ by saying:

This complementary impulse—between overt hyper-phallicity and only slightly less overt homosociality, as it were—constitutes the peculiar construction of Maupassantian masculinity that I will call ―genital consciousness‖. With this term, I refer to a social and artistic 146

awareness and practice focusing heavily, if not solely, on activities, narrative devices, and subjects that relate, explicitly or implicitly, to the effects and stimuli of female and male genitalia. Evidence of this ―consciousness‖ abounds in Maupassant‘s fiction, ―La Petite Roque‖ offering perhaps the most brutal example, yet one that is tempered and nuanced by the tale‘s recourse to the fantastic. In the case of A la feuille de rose, the particular homosocial practices also implicate a theatrical demonstration of barely disguised homosexual desire. (58)

Stivale outlines briefly the three facets of this ―consciousness‖ - Maupassant the pornographer, Maupassant the exhibitionist, and Maupassant the hedonist. Therefore, this complexity of his personality can be also seen in his different characters and subjects as well. The subject of his fiction, in a very broader sense, is humanity, and throughout his works Maupassant has presented a unique perspective on how money and passion, avarice and jealousy, physical beauty and physical suffering have been dominating influences on humanity. For him, humanity is mad, greedy, licentious and stupid but after all, it is beautiful. Though incredibly base yet it is exceedingly exalted. To Maupassant there are terrible ironies everywhere in human life. He has also depicted the various contradictions in life, presenting each aspect with equal strength. For example, even if a woman is a prostitute she can also play a magnificent role, as shown in his ‗Boule de Suif‘. In his other stories, sometimes a woman is rich but depraved; poor but generous; beautiful but mean; divine but deceitful; and even there are farm-girls or lonely English virgins, as in ―Miss Harriet,‖ but they are at once pitiable and stupid; they have beautiful bodies but empty heads and even empty hearts. Therefore, this contradiction in his attitude towards women, especially in the representation of woman and her sexuality, can be seen throughout his writings.

3. Conclusion: A Multidimensional Representation of Female Sexuality

Agnes Rutherford Riddell in his book Flaubert and Maupassant: A Literary Relationship critiques the attitude of both Flaubert and Maupassant towards women. He says, ―Neither author holds any very high conception of womankind. Each speaks of woman as incomprehensible, unreasonable, perfidious…as one would expect, the usual presentation of women, love, and marriage given by the two writers is cynical, with practical elimination of the idea‖ (Riddell 19). Even Maupassant himself has 147 pointed out that Flaubert was disdainful of women, judging them severely from a distance, but exhibiting certain tenderness towards them when brought into a closer relationship (Riddell 19). Further, Riddell observes that the good female characters are rare in both of them, and if by chance, we find one, like Mame Arnoux or Jeanne, it is certain that they could be either commonplace or stupid. For example, the childish devotion of Justin to Emma in Madame Bovary or Rosalie in Une Vie, ―and the constant affection of the woman in Corsica who had given up everything for the man she loved and expressed herself as perfectly satisfied after fifty years of the hard life to which she had devoted herself‖ (Riddell 19-20). These cases are exceptional in him; the general picture is pessimistic in its extreme.

The misogynistic and negative racial stereotypical portrayal of women shadows the overall impression of Maupassant‘s stories in which human love and sexuality are the privileged subjects. In fact, Maupassant‘s representation of female characters is swinging between two poles: in some stories, the representation is colonial and misogynistic while in others he presented them as active, subjective and unconventional for some positive change. Further, on the one hand, he promoted the colonial racist and misogynist attitude in his stories such as ―Allouma‖ and ―Marroca‖, but one the other hand, some of his writings are against the West‘s brutal conquest of Orient. For example, in her in-depth reading of Maupassant‘s novel Bel- Ami Susan Barrow points out a clear manifestation of Maupassant‘s negative attitude towards France‘s imperialistic aims. According to her Maupassant‘s Bel-Ami ―suggests that the West‘s brutal conquest of the Orient and the colonialist imposition of its institutions in these territories may well have unforeseen consequences‖ (326; qtd. in Poteau-Tralie 147).

Maupassant talks about the relationship between man and woman who, in his view, are always strangers and always remain belligerents. The society is always sustained by the unequal relationship between master and slave, who could never have an equal status; Maupassant illustrates this relationship in the same manner in his story ―The Log‖ as:

However great the love may be that unites them, a man and a woman are always strangers in mind and intellect; they remain belligerents, they belong to different races. There must always be a conqueror and a conquered, a master and a slave; now the one, now the other—they are 148

never equal. They press each other‘s hands, hands crumbling with amorous passion; but they never press them with a long, strong, loyal pressure, a pressure which seems to open hearts and to by them bare in a burst of sincere, strong, manly affection. (Maupassant, TCSSM 616)

Therefore, through Maupassant‘s short stories various unequal relationships between men and women that exist in a society can be seen controlled by different power constructing institutions. Whether it is the relationship between husband and wife, master and slave or conqueror and conquered, the inequality is prevalent in each of them - one is dominated by the other. The divisions such as ‗subject‘ and ‗object‘ create binaries, leading to the catastrophic consequences for the dominated.

Feminism as a cluster of theories and movements strives to undermine these unequal power structures which are prevalent in every society from times immemorial. The main purpose of the feminist reading of Maupassant‘s stories in this chapter has been to highlight such practices through which woman are oppressed, exploited and marginalized as ‗other‘, and particularly an attempt has been made to study the dominant power structures in late nineteenth-century France. Maupassant, throughout his stories, has clearly presented this relationship of ‗self and other‘, ‗powerful and weak‘, ‗centre and marginal‘ and most of all ‗man and woman‘. He has presented women who are suffering in the patriarchal society in which femininity is social construction and jeopardy. Women are everywhere urged ―Be women, stay women, become women‖ (Beauvoir 3). However, even being a sensible serious person and fully aware of the situation of woman in his contemporary France, Maupassant could not resist himself to objectify woman by his male gaze. In many of his stories, the subconscious and as well as the conscious ‗male gaze‘ dominates his writing, and he has used many misogynist expressions and metaphors to present woman. This shows the condition of woman within patriarchy. This is described, through the satirical metaphors, by Luce Irigaray as: ―Stifled beneath all those eulogistic or derogatory metaphors, she (woman) is unable to unpick the seams of her disguise and indeed takes a certain pleasure in them, even gilding the lily further at times‖ (qtd. in Garb 115). The female representation in Maupassant‘s stories is both liberating as well as mystifying in gendered as well as in racial stereotypical terms, and which resulted in his depiction of an ambiguous dichotomy of female sexuality. 149

It sometimes puzzles the readers in deciding his true attitude towards woman. While reading his stories, one comes across a kind of representation which complicates the nature and existence of women by amalgamating the various colonial, patriarchal, misogynistic and animalistic images. Furthermore, there are certain themes and motifs in his stories which recur frequently. For example, his male characters are represented mostly as henpecked husbands, while their wives as shrewish women, and for this reason he has been often accused of misogyny. In ―The Necklace‖ the vanity of woman is shown as the cause of all trouble of the family, but in ―Boule de Suif,‖ a prostitute becomes the saviour of all the crew. Again in ―Mademoiselle Fifi‖ a prostitute is shown as a true patriot who defends the honour of her country.

The complex identity of female characters in Maupassant‘s stories is further complicated by their multi-dimensional and many-faceted roles, starting from domestic wives and oppressed daughters to patriotic prostitutes and ‗degenerated‘ female characters. His stories cover every aspect of their social reality. Thus a Feminist comparative reading of Maupassant‘s stories such as ―The Necklace,‖ ―Boule de Suif,‖ ―Allouma,‖ ―A Useless Beauty‖ and many others clearly points out to his ambivalent attitude towards women which is at once misogynistic and sympathetic. It shows simultaneously the vanity of her head and the magnanimity of heart.

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Works Cited

Barrow, Susan M. ―East/West: Appropriation of Aspects of the Orient in Maupassant‘s Bel-Ami.‖ Nineteenth-Century French Studies. 30. 3-4 (2002): 315-28. PDF file.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany- Chevallier. London: Vintage Books, 2011. Print.

Berberich, Christine. The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia. UK: University of Derby, 2007. Print.

Bloom, Harold. Guy de Maupassant. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004. Print.

Boyd, Ernest A. Guy De Maupassant: A Biographical Study. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1926. Print.

De Bury, Yetta Blaze. ―Guy de Maupassant.‖ French Literature of To-day: A Study of the Principal Romancers and Essayists. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co, 1898. Print

Doumic, Rene. ―Guy de Maupassant.‖ Contemporary French Novelists. Trans. Mary D. Frost. New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell & Company, 1899. Print.

Filipowicz, Marcin.‗―EVERYTHING THE SAME AS HERE‖: Misogyny in Czech Modernist Poetry at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century.‘ Gender and Modernity in Central Europe: The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its Legacy. Ed. Schwartz, Agatha. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010. 103-115. Print.

Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Print.

Garb, Tamar. ―‗UNPICKING THE SEAMS OF HER DISGUISE‘: Self- representation in the case of Marie Bashkirtseff.‖ The Block Reader in Visual Culture. Ed. George Robertson. New York: Routledge Publications, 1996:115- 128. PDF file

Goyet, Florence. The Classic Short Story, 1870-1925: Theory of a Genre. UK: Open Book Publishers, 2014. Web. http://openbookpublishers.com/htmlreader/978- 1-909254-75-6/Index.xhtml#indexScribd reader 151

Hainsworth, G. ―Pattern and Symbol in the Work of Maupassant‖. French Studies. 5.1(1951): pp.1-17. URL: http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/content/V/1/1.citation

Ledger, Sally, and Roger Luckhurst, eds. The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1880 – 1900. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997. Print.

Maupassant, Guy de. The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant. 10 vols. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1903. Print.

---. Pierre and Jean. Trans Crew. London: William Heinemann, 1923. Print.

---. Short Stories of de Maupassant. New York: Books, Inc. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008. Web. http://www.archive.org/shortstoriesofde00maupuoft

---. Short Stories of the Tragedy and Comedy of Life. Ohio: Saint Dunstan Society, 1903. Print.

---. The Necklace and Other Short Stories. Ed. Stanley Applebaum. USA: Dover Publications, Inc. 1992. Web.

---. The Old Maid and Other Stories. New York: The C. T. Brainard Publishing Co., 1909. PDF File.

Nevers, Thomas. ―De Maupassant on Feminism.‖ The New York Times, May 29, 1916. Web.

O‘Neill, Maggie. Prostitution and Feminism: Towards a Politics of Feeling. UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001. Print.

Patrick, Jonathan. ―Maupassant‘s Men: Masculinity and the Franco-Prussian War.‖ Fin de Siecle?. Ed. Anne Fremiot. Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 1998: 17-26. Print.

Poteau-Tralie, Mary. ―Reframing Guy de Maupassant‘s ―Allouma‖ through the Lens of Assia Djebar: Postcolonial Algeria Confronts Colonial France.‖ Dalhousie French Studies. 94 (2011): 141-148. Dalhousie University. Web. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41705590 Riddell, Agnes Rutherford. Flaubert and Maupassant: A Literary Relationship. Diss. Chicago: The Chicago UP, 1920. Print. 152

Robbins, Ruth. Literary Feminisms. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Print.

Steegmuller, Francis. Maupassant: A Lion in the Path. New York: Random House, 1949. Print.

Stivale, Charles J. ―Horny Dudes: Guy de Maupassant and the Masculine Feuille de rose.” L'Esprit Créateur. 43.3 (2003):57-67.The Johns Hopkins UP. Web. 14 May 2013

Surendran, K.V. ―Treatment of Women in Maupassant and Madhavikutty.‖ New Perspectives and Indian and Western fiction. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons. 2002. 115-125. Print.

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Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989. Print.

CHAPTER V

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Woman in Different Shades from Prostitution to the Partition: Reading Manto’s Stories from Feminist Perspective

―Prostitutes are not born, they are made‖ ~ Manto ―One is not born a woman, but becomes one‖ ~Simone de Beauvoir

Outline

The above-mentioned quotes perfectly summarize this chapter. One is not born a woman or prostitute; rather it is the patriarchy and overpowering socio-political systems which construct sex into gender. Therefore, this chapter shows how Manto has raised a strong voice, through his stories, against the age-long oppression of the other sex. It is a feminist reading of the select short stories that highlight the hypocrisy of patriarchal society, in its subjugation of woman, the creation of prostitution and bifurcation of sexes through different institutions. Whether in prostitution or the partition of Indian subcontinent into two nation states, woman has been victimized and sexually exploited. However, Manto has bestowed her supreme status in his stories in which she claims her subjectivity, counters male objectification and claims equality. The double standards of the social system are questioned again and again in his stories, and hence, this chapter, in contrast to the previous chapter on Maupassant, brings out entire issues related to woman and their emancipation.

1. Introduction

Sadat Hasan Manto, a storyteller par excellence, through his art made the world acknowledge his mastery. He had the unparalleled gift of writing stories in which he narrated real events and rendered them alive and immortal. In the words of 154

Rakhshanda Jalil, ―he had the rare gift of being able to narrate the most blood- curdling events with faithful accuracy and an unsparing for detail‖ (Jalil, Introduction vii). He was very well aware of his artistic gift and wrote an epitaph a few days before his death: ―here (Manto) lies buried—and buried in his breast are all the secrets of the art of story-telling‖ (qtd. in Jalil vii).

Human life which he observed very minutely from different angles is the major subject of Manto‘s stories. Among the different aspects of life and society, Manto cherry-picked those themes which other writers would hesitate to think of - themes that were bold and unconventional and which were considered as taboos in Urdu literature. So, Manto studied the book of society and the people living in it. He studied various aspects of the world around him and depicted everything truthfully. His stories are a composite and complete world which is described by Waqar Azeen as:

Manto has seen many facets of the world around him. Whatever he saw, like an important obligation he tried to make them the subject of his stories. This is the reason that there is much more than politics, romance, and psychoanalysis in his stories. The perspiration of labourer‘s forehead; the one way and self-centred sexual relationship between poor and rich; the despairing condition of poverty, and the people living in that hopeless condition, are restless to eradicate, by some revolution, the poverty and the problems that came out of it. (160, Self trans.)

In his book, Sadat Hasan Manto, Waqar Azeem has discussed Manto‘s major themes in general and his characterization of prostitutes in particular, which he discovered was the result of Freudian influence on him. He says, ―Manto is the most reprehensible short story writer of Urdu and I consider his contiguity with ‗prostitute and Freud‘ made him so ignominious‖ (Azeem 158, Self trans.). Waqar points out that the subject of prostitutes and influence of Freud are the two elements that gave his writings the clarity, ease and glibness. Without these, his stories would have been very dry and without flow. Therefore, while analyzing his stories if one does the mistake of ignoring the two things, the world of his stories would become hollow and colourless. However, ―…living in this hollow and colourless world, Manto has written much more than his ‗specific world‘‖ (Azeem 158). 155

On the subject of woman rights and freedom, Manto has written in a way that no other writer of Urdu literature can be compared with him. Woman plays every type of role in his fiction - from a daughter to a mother. He was too much concerned with her issues that he has not left any aspect of her life untouched in his writings. From prostitution to the partition, he has described in his works the oppression of women under various social-political institutions governed by the patriarchal system.

The fact cannot be denied that the most read and appreciated short stories of Sadat Hasan Manto are those which characterize women (prostitutes) and their unequal treatment in society. In this regard, Waqar Azeen says that as far as the art is considered, Manto‘s most successful stories are those which talk about woman‘s condition in society and particularly, her association with prostitution. The subject and description of the surroundings bring in his mind and pen such rapidity, clarity and ease that his plots are perfectly comprehensive without lacking anything (161). Commonly known as ―fallen women‖, their social conditions have attracted various writers around the world. For example, the poetry of Pietro Aretino and Antonio Baffo in Italian literature, the powerful and influential short stories of Guy de Maupassant and Zola, and in Urdu literature, Nazir Akbarabadi, Rusva and Manto have written so much on ―fallen women‖ that these writers are mainly known for the subject. Among them, Manto has depicted the reality of these socially marginalized figures and highlighted the sensitive female situation of the period that marks the transition from colonial period to independence.

Manto‘s arrow was sharper than his contemporaries. It forcefully hit at the centre of the prevailing dominant oppressive institutions at that time. One of his contemporaries was Ismat Chughtai, Manto‘s close friend, who also wrote very boldly and brazenly. But contrary to Ismat, Manto‘s style was ―stark, spare, almost staccato style, unembellished and unaffected, deliberately shorn of all appendages of style and convention‖ (Jalil ‗Introduction‘ NV vii-viii). Manto‘s craft unveiled the injustice and discrimination prevailing in the society - the sexual perversion and moral decay, and his attempt was to depict the masquerading evil in its real face. His stories identified and highlighted the structurally biased institutions, and became a strong resistance against the dominant oppressive ideologies.

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2. Sex, Prostitution, and Partition: A Feminist Reading

To Manto sex is one of the most vital instinctual and elemental urges of human beings. Like hunger, it is primal and the suppression of it can lead to an anomalous life. It is true that Manto wrote obsessively about sex and ―he often treated sex as a part of life‘s essential pangs -hunger, sleep and love‖ (Jalil NV xiv). The themes related to sex definitely reveal Freudian influences on him. The influence can best be seen in his ―Swaraj Ke Liye,‖ (For Freedom‘s Sake) in which Manto has shown how the suppression of healthy expression of the sex can affect the lives of people. By deftly blending politics and sex, he has questioned the validity of both marriage and patriotism. In this regard, one is reminded of his statement in the story ―Paanch Din‖ (Five Days) that ―to kill a legitimate desire is tantamount to a heinous murder and to kill one‘s nature is to do violence to oneself‖ (qtd. in Shireen 41, Self trans.). Similarly, in his stories he has examined the nature of sex ―without batting an eyelid and without resorting to moralistic preaching‖ (Asaduddin 21). This treatment of sex in his stories is unparalleled in the entire Urdu literature. ―Manto‘s interest in sex made him anomalously popular with the younger generation, but his ostentatious treatment of it comes close to bravado, and impairs the quality of some of his good stories‖ (Sadiq 587; qtd. in Asaduddin, BM 21).

Manto has best examined the nature of sex in his masterpiece ―Odour,‖ a story of great power and impact. ―The sexual activity in this story is portrayed as something primal, pure jouissance, unhindered by any social convention or any moral taboos or scruples‖ (Asaduddin, BM 23). In the story Randhir although had an experience of sex with Anglo-Indian prostitutes, his encounter with a Ghatan woman transformed him completely. The pleasure that she gave him was natural. A noted Urdu critic, Waris Alvi, illustrates that the union between Randhir and the Ghatan can be understood as the union of Purush and Prakriti [Randhir represented Purush (the masculine principle) and the Ghatan woman represented Prakriti (the feminine principle)] (qtd. in Asaduddin, BM 24). Moreover, their union has done away with all the class differences. Manto has used the images and symbols of natural world only to accentuate the primal nature of the sexual encounter. By using natural metaphors like bowls fresh from ‗potter‘s hands‘ for her breasts which gleam like ―muddy water‖, Manto has also blurred the binary oppositions between nature and culture, because the cultural constructions have been defining beauty and all other things by dividing 157 society into classes. Thus, he has firmly rooted the female character of Ghatan in the earth. The sexual relationship of Randhir with his wife is purely physical while the same relationship with Ghatan is totally different. The sexual experience with Ghatan goes beyond the physical senses, it touches his soul and involves his whole being. The sexual relationship represented by Manto is more complex than represented by his peers if ever attempted in Urdu literature.

Besides its theme and subject ―Bu‖ (Odour) was highly praised for its techniques. Although, it was one of the stories that were accused of obscenity, yet technically it has been accepted as a masterpiece. It describes Randhir‘s feelings in an extraordinary flagrant and vivid language. Upendra Nath Ashk‘s assessment of ―Bu‖ is very powerful. He says, ‗The skillfulness with which Manto has dealt with an extremely delicate theme in ―Bu‖ is worthy not only of praise but of imitation as well…My advice to every budding story writer wanting to understand the technique of the short story is certainly to read ―Bu‖ ‘(qtd. in Flemming 6). There are other critics who have viewed the complex theme of ―Bu‖ in different ways. For example, Ismat Chughtai has seen it dealing with a moral distinction between the rich and poor. She says:

The Ghatan, stinking from dirt and sweat, seems more fragrant than the pleasure-loving bride, drowned in perfume. Although there is a lot of body in ―Bu,‖ if you look closely, inside the body there is also a soul, the soul of the pleasure-loving class, full of clots like spoiled milk, and that of the downtrodden class genuine and free of artifice. If it is not a question of class distinction, neither can we say it is completely a question of the physical. The idea of the distinction between the two classes was certainly in Manto‘s mind, and he felt very brave smashing to the ground the idol which the world worships (qtd. in Flemming 61; Chughtai 302),

Furthermore, Mumtaz Shireen, a critic often at odds with Progressive Writers Movement, stresses on the opposition in the story between the natural and artificial as personified by the Ghatan and the bride and other Anglo-Indian prostitutes respectively. According to her:

In this opposition is hidden a wider opposition, the opposition [of] nearness to and distance from nature, the opposition between nature 158

free from outside influences and artifice, and gilded artificiality. Formed in society and washed in the gilding of culture, this fair- skinned girl cannot produce in Randhir the warmth, the fire that the other girl, brought up in the lap of nature. Her healthy, firm, earth- colored body, with the fragrance of freshly wetted clay, symbolized the freshness, robustness and attractiveness of nature. This girl in ―Bu‖ is a ―child of nature.‖ (43, Trans. Flemming).

In contrast to both Ismat Chughtai and Mumtaz Shireen, Lesli A. Flemming has asserted that the story is primarily concerned with male and female sexual relationship which is presented through familiar natural metaphors. The basic oppositions between the natural and artificial, between the rusty Ghatan and the city bride, between the natural odour and artificial perfumes, keep struggling in Randhir‘s life. In Flemming‘s words:

…the story most simply clothes in flesh-and-blood characters… an extended metaphor familiar to readers of classical Hindu literature. In this metaphor female is identified with the earth, the male with a cloud, rain falling on the earth with sexual relation, and the odor, which often accompanies the first monsoon rains, with the resulting sexual pleasure (62).

Furthermore, Flemming states that the Ghatan woman is a metaphorical symbol and once the metaphor is discovered then the rest of the metaphors upon which the story is built will also come into view (63). In this story, Manto has defined the human sexual relationship as an intensely moving experience; it is stripped off from the artifice of both commercial transaction and socially acceptable commitment. It is absolutely a mystical experience, beyond the worldly material desires. Manto has used ―dying‖ henna as a materialist symbol for the lifeless bride, while the experience with the Ghatan woman is profoundly stirring and life-giving. Therefore, the story is a journey and mystical experience which includes basic earthly as well as celestial and cosmic elements. Manto in this story makes use of Hindu mythology to express the complexity and characterization of a sexual relationship.

In Hamareliye Manto Sahab, Shamasul Rehman Farooqi has approached the ―Bu‖ very uniquely. Contrary to Shireen‘s assessment, he has considered Manto‘s representation of the character of Ghatan merely as passive and submissive. 159

According to him, this story is wholly presented from Randhir‘s point of view. He is satisfied with Ghatan woman, but the satisfaction of Ghatan has not been discussed anywhere in the story. Is she satisfied with him or not? Is her relation with Randhir a compulsion or her necessity? These questions are not answered in the story. She is depicted as a sex object who is objectified merely for the sexual lust of Randhir. Contrary to the other female characters that, to some extent, have some subjective role, the Ghatan woman is exclusively a passive, submissive and idealized character in the story. Farooqi further notes that even if as a passive and as a sex object there is at least a kind of role of Ghatan woman, but the newlywed woman is not given any existence in the story. She has not been treated even as a sex object. Her status is nothing, not even a thing to touch or play with. Also, the difference between ―city‖ and ―nature‖ in the story is artificial and temporary (Farooqi 77). However, Farooqi has contradicted himself by saying that we all respect and love Manto because to him human is only human and woman is only woman - she is not only a prostitute who works so hard only to cajole men. In Manto‘s fictional world men and women are equal, that is, both the sexes are human; both are subjects (Farooqi 107). The contradiction in his views renders his allegations against Manto‘s representations of women very weak.

On the whole, Manto‘s stories related to sex and prostitution are often considered as a complex amalgamation of psychoanalysis, sexuality, humanism, motherly affection, feelings of oppression and loneliness and most of all the concerns of moral fortification. Further, Waris Alvi illustrates it as:

All the stories related to the subject of prostitution cannot be called the stories of sex, even if sex is the dominating element and profession in the life and character of a prostitute. However, the central focus of these stories is to mirror the motherly affection or helplessness and loneliness or the uninterested passion for helping others; or those aspects of a prostitute that highlight the humanism and femininity of her character. The central interest of these stories is not sex but some other actions of moral and psychological nature. (qtd. in Fatmi 36)

In this context, Manto is the first short story writer in Urdu literature who presented female sexuality in prostitution, revealing both the physical and psychological forms of exploitation. He has seen prostitutes with humanistic sympathy. Hasan Masna adds 160 more by saying that he has given us fine lessons on humanism by dealing with these two topics and proved himself as a true moral artist (117). Further, it would not be an exaggeration to say that he was the first Urdu fiction writer who explored the real woman hidden inside prostitutes by presenting their struggling physical life. He portrayed her desire for living a warm domestic and peaceful life.

Another concern in Manto‘s stories is to show the ray of light in dark and spark of good in evil (socially constructed evil, prostitution). This ray of light is present in most of his characters whether man/women, pimp/prostitute etc. For example, through his famous character Sahai, a pimp by profession, Manto has shown that he too has a good aspect of the human inside him who can think beyond his profession. He too can discriminate between right and wrong. He is honest even if his profession is unacceptable to the moral and social laws. Manto has stressed rather on the institutions of society which force its denizens to walk on the wrong paths. He highlights the negatives that are hidden under the masquerading innocence of society. As a realist he has presented society as it is, and dealt with reality in its all facets. When he was accused of obscenity and tried many times, Manto justified his stories by saying that:

If you are unaware of the period we are passing through, and then read my stories. If you cannot bear these stories, it means that this period (society) is unbearable. There is nothing wrong in my writings which are attributed to my name. In reality, it is a flaw of the present system. (Dastawaiz 53, Self trans.)

In his unique way, he satirized the prevailing evils in society, particularly the powerful institutions which structure everything and divide society into binaries. Manto was against the concepts of right and wrong. He rebelled, as a true realist, against the old conventions of writing about the legendary kings and queens, fairy spirits and their enchantments. Manto wrote stories based on reality which instilled in hearts and in minds sympathy for the underprivileged of society. Most of his characters are drawn from the lower classes. Sometimes, under the influence of Freud, these characters are portrayed through animalistic imagery; however, there is nothing obscene or pornographic in them, rather it is the realistic representation of humanity with all hues, of which Chekhov was once famous for. 161

Manto was a minute observer, and like a psychologist he has presented characters very minutely and acutely in his stories. The majority of his stories are based on his deep analysis of characters, not only their commonality or explicitness, but he has also explored their inner and personal lives very closely. The overall concentration in his stories lies in the characterization. He has observed the man- woman relationship and deconstructed its relationship with society. Among his stories, his most powerful stories are those based on female characters. Perhaps, being a male writer, he could very interestingly present them from every aspect. In this context, Parvaiz Shaharyar says, ―…Since Manto was a male short story writer, even he has represented very minutely and with artistic dexterously the psyche of women, their inner lives, sexual problems and social injustice‖ (Shaharyar 48). The fine examples among his stories are ―Insult,‖ ―Black Shalwar,‖ ―Sharida,‖ ―Odour,‖ ―Cold Meat,‖ ―Mozil,‖ ―Mummy,‖ ―Janki,‖ ―Babu Gopinath,‖ ―Sarkande Ke Peeche,‖ ―Pairan,‖ ―Basit,‖ ―Smoke,‖ ―Open it,‖ ―Hundred Candle Power Bulb,‖ ―Dawda Pehlwan‖ and ―Khushiya,‖ to name a few.

It does not matter to Manto what apparently one does for his or her survival; rather he peeps deeply into the reality of their existence, and for that he jumps into the depths of dark oceans to look for pearls. He walks through thorns to pick up flowers and his eyes are observing stars behind the dark clouds. He has never pointed his finger at downtrodden and weak; rather, he has highlighted the institutions that are responsible for their marginality. He is sympathetic towards the prostitutes and detests the institutions of society that construct their identities. It is the society which creates prostitutes and later marginalizes them as dirty and unbearable for civilized society. Manto points out metaphorically in the following passage that:

The flesh trade is necessary, because as beautiful cars, which you see in city, are not meant for taking away the dirt and rubbish from the city. There are some other cars for that purpose to which you hardly look at, and if you sight them, you suddenly put hanky on your nose. Like these cars, these women too are necessary for taking away the dirt from you. If these women were not there, our streets would have been filled with the wicked actions of men. (Manto, Kuliyat 157, Self trans.)

It reveals Manto‘s concern about prostitutes, and he has highlighted their passive presence in society. According to him, their only purpose is to take away the 162 dirt from society for a minimum wage. But why should they do so? Manto does not answer it. Even if he has ironically spoken about a society where people think that a particular class of women (prostitutes) should carry the dirt, then too this passage conveys an unbalanced opinion. Moreover, this passage contradicts Manto‘s understanding of the prostitute as a woman. His prostitute is first a woman then a prostitute. Of course, she sells her body to earn some money but at that time, while selling her body, her soul soars away from the body, and therefore, the customer can never buy the soul of a prostitute. Manto narrates a prostitute‘s experience thus:

Men take me out into the fields. I just lie there, immobile, without a sound - dead, inert. Only my eyes are open, gazing far, far into the distance, where some she-goats are going at one another under the shade of the trees. Oh, what an idyllic scene! I start counting the she- goats, or the Ravens on the branches—nineteen, twenty-one, twenty- two…Meanwhile, the man has finished, withdrawn, and is panting heavily some distance from me. But I‘m not aware of any of this. (―Prostitution‖ 415, Trans. Memon)

This quote directly refers to the passive involvement of a prostitute in her profession. She is doing it only to fulfil her need which is, of course, other than sex. A great number of examples can be drawn from various other short stories in which Manto has shown that prostitutes are unable to fulfil their basic needs even after selling their bodies. For instance, Sugandhi, Kushia, Sharida, Sultana etc., struggle all their day and night but still they wish they could have their basic requirements fulfilled. Manto has compared her (prostitute) with the bus that travels all night and is then left alone in the morning by its passengers covered by dust all over it. At another place, in ―Black Shalwar‖, she has been described like a rail-box which is useless without an engine. However, the engine pulls her for some time but then leaves her alone somewhere in the middle of the track. Manto says that prostitute is a woman who is hapless and without friends; even if thousands of men come to her with the same desire, she still remains lonely and isolated. People call her dirty. The same man who seeks pleasure in the night with her looks at her with contemptuous and disgusting eyes on the following day, and this clearly points out to the double standards of society (Manto, BM 167). 163

Manto sympathized with the class of the society [prostitutes] towards which everyone else is contemptuous. He was very familiar with their travails, joys and sorrows. ―If he had not looked for a woman in a whore and a whore in a woman many of his masterpieces would not have come into existence. Hatak, Kali Shalwar, Mummy, Khushiya are positive proofs of it‖ (Wadhawan 59).

Balwant Gargi, a well-known writer and playwright, gives the description of his experience with Bari Alig and Manto in the red-light district of Lahore. He describes Manto‘s sympathy for the class of people as:

Manto suffered from a strange kind of desolation. Although he lived in the world of prostitutes, yet he was detached from them. But he saw humanity in these abodes of sin. He saw a woman‘s heart even in those fallen and dissolute women. He was looking for a woman‘s soul even in the market of flesh-trade. (Wadhawan 59)

While presenting the life of prostitutes Manto‘s realism touched a climax. One is surprised by his minute descriptions even in his earlier stories such as ―Hatak,‖ ―Kali Shalwar,‖ ―Mummy,‖ ―Khushiya,‖ ―Das Rupiye,‖ ―Pehchan‖ etc. His eyes could pierce through the dark, narrow and shabby hut and see the intensity and depth of the soul of a person just sitting there. One can rarely find a short story writer like Manto who saw a prostitute with such sympathy and compassion. In this context, Waris Alvi writes:

When a woman becomes a prostitute, the woman in her does not die but she continues to live with her human behaviour and demands. Manto wants to see those glimpses of the prostitute, living in the stinky environment of prostitution, that narrates the story of humanism and womanhood, and that is why he is characterizing them in his stories. Manto does not sentimentalize and idealize the prostitute. In order to show her moral personality, he never presents her doing some work of disinterested and sexual sacrifice because morality can never be the scale of Manto for judging a prostitute - her righteousness and wickedness. (50, Self trans.)

Moreover, his stories on the theme of prostitution narrate the tragic life of oppressed downtrodden people. In prostitution they are marginalized and are rendered 164 as objects of pleasure, and therefore, their identity is reduced to mere sexual objects. In the words of Lesli A. Flemming:

…both ―Kali Shalwar‖ and ―Hatak‖ contain implicit criticism of the exploitation of women in prostitution and of the dependent role of women in general. Of the later stories focusing on prostitutes, only the bitterly sarcastic ―Laisens‖ (License) in Khali Botelein, Khali Debbe contain commentary on the economic facts of prostitution. (86-87)

A woman plays different roles in Manto‘s stories. She acts as a mother, daughter, wife, prostitute etc., and Manto likes her in each aspect. However, there exists a very common prototype of a domestic woman who longs to stay at one place. She is fed up with changing places in search of customers. Sometimes her loneliness becomes the most disturbing and horrible thing to bear. The passage from ―Kali Shalwar‖ (The Black Shalwar) expresses this idea thus:

On the right was an open field criss-crossed with railway tracks… the rails…reminded Sultana of her hand on the back of which blue veins stood out just like the rails. Railway engines and carriages went by constantly, in one direction or the other; there was a perpetual noise of moving trains. If Sultana came out on the balcony early in the morning, she could see thick clouds of smoke emerging from the vents of the engines, clouds that rose slowly, like fat and heavy men, towards the murky sky… Whenever she saw a carriage that had been propelled by an engine and then left to advance on its own, Sultana was reminded of her life. Like that lone carriage, she had been propelled on the tracks of life and then abandoned; other people were changing tracks, but she continued to move in the same direction. Where she was headed for, she did not know. And then, one day, she would lose the impetus that had moved her; she would stop somewhere, probably at a place about which she knew nothing. (Manto 29, Trans. Naqvi)

In the above quoted passage, Manto has portrayed the tedious existence of a prostitute who is fed up with her mechanical existence. She, like every other woman, wants to stay with only one man all her life. But life has deceived her like a rail- engine which pushed her for some time and then left her alone. She wants to quit this mechanical life of shifting and moving alone but it does not happen. By using the 165 parable of a rail engine and its changing anchors to support the other boxes, Manto has attempted to express the suppressed emotions of Sultana, the protagonist of his story ―The Black Shalwar‖. The allegory also depicts the mechanical or animalistic pattern of life.

When Manto and Ismat Chugtai started writing on the subjects related to women and her sexuality, it was the period when the women‘s freedom movement had just begun in India. Women, who had since ages been entrapped in the four walls of the home, barred from education and other basic rights, began to struggle for the educational and political rights. They began to resist the male dominance. Ismat Chugtai, who like Manto also wrote on the question of woman, named this facet of woman as ‗rebellion‘. In most of her essays and stories she has represented her female characters resisting the morality created by the man-dominated society which was fundamentally ‗phallocentric‘ and based on the philosophy of ‗phallocentricism‘. The rebellion against the fixed rules is very important, according to Chugtai and therefore, she considers it significant for the women‘s freedom. Ismat Chugtai has depicted the ‗rebellious woman‘ as the follower of the woman‘s ‗Kala Roop‘ (black face) who is ready to shatter the shackles and restraints created by phallocentric ‗morality‘. Similarly, Manto has portrayed various characters of women who resist exploitation of different social or political institutions. According to Wazir Agha, ―Manto too, at a conscious level, has created a woman that is alive (particularly from the perspective of her sexuality); she can look into the eyes of men, and she is not ready to become meaningless before the man‖ (381, Self trans.).

Like Ismat Chugtai, Manto has also presented some brave female characters who rebel and resist the dominant patriarchy, and this aspect or role was his favourite one. However, the representation of these characters in his stories is slightly different because he has only presented the external aspect of their rebellion. For example in ―The Black Shalwar‖, Sultana is apparently shown as a woman who loathes and rebels against the prostitution in which the condition of prostitutes is like those of trains, one engine pulling the boxes for some time and then leaving them alone in the middle of the track. But deep inside her, she is still dreaming of her engine that would drive her one day. The inner and the outer of Sultana are contradicting. In this contradiction, the rebellious aspect emerges very weakly. Finally, she accepts the conventional faithful and devotional role of women and bows before man. 166

Besides being very good friends, both Manto and Ismat shared many common views and wrote against the exploitation and suppression of women. But the ‗sakhtiya‘ (structure) of woman which we find in Manto is very different from Ismat‘s. Most of Ismat‘s women characters are rebellious at the core, both within and without. But Manto‘s women characters somehow accept the conventionally fixed role of ‗angel in the house‘. It reminds of Wazir Agha‘s important observation that ―Manto‘s female characters are not according to his own will and choice. In other words, instead of rebelling against those set principles by men, they tend to become culprits of rebellion against the author itself‖ (382 Self trans.).

However, in Manto‘s stories one can easily discern the voice of the author, powerfully raised against the structure of the male-dominated society where a woman has been given a status of a commodity for business - a thing to be traded at different ―mandies‖ (marketplaces). Like other items in the marketplace, a woman too is sold by various hands and reaches various rich men. She becomes a thing for pleasure and is rejected after she is used. Manto has, therefore, questioned the moral structure of society by portraying some female characters rebelling against the conventional and customary roles of woman. They stand against man and raise their voices to proclaim their identities.

One of the aspects of her rebellion is when she shatters the conventions of woman‘s confinement within the four walls of the home. The usual practice in the male-dominated society is that man is considered the earning hand in the family who dominates the family by providing women two meals to sustain their lives, while the woman is confined to four walls; she is not supposed to earn and thus is forced to be obedient and submissive. When Manto portrayed a woman who could earn for herself, it was something new and unconventional at that time. He thus emancipated her from the economic and other social bondages. She smashed the old customs under which woman was not allowed to go out, and to use Wazir Agha‘s words, ―The coin earned by the women is opposite to the coin of the paternal rule‖ (383). In his article ―Manto Kay Afsaanu Main Auwrat!‖ Ma‘nay aur Tanazur‖, Wazir Agha further maintains that:

At the surface level, Manto was esurient for emancipating woman from the cultural reproach by portraying the natural aspect of her sexuality in his stories. He has presented man as a tyrant and an authoritarian 167

while woman as downtrodden and subjugated. When Manto, in his stories, highlights the oppressions which are inflicted on women, he too contradicts with the world of man; however, he brings out a woman from the cultural bondage by giving her reciprocal power at the natural stage of her sexuality. Thus, he annihilates the cultural division between man and woman, and by in this way he considered woman‘s rebellion legitimate. (383, Self trans.)

Thus, in his stories Manto depicts firstly the oppression of woman, particularly belonging to the downtrodden class. Secondly, he portrays them as rebels against the oppression. In one of his articles called ―Lazat-e Sang‖ Manto expressed his sympathy for a prostitute towards whom the society has been indifferent. Unlike other women, he finds her life and existence more interesting and fit for his stories. Manto says that:

In our neighbourhood if a woman is beaten by his husband every day and then she polished his shoes, I have no sympathy for her in my heart. But if some woman in our neighbour quarrels with her husband and then with a warning of suicide she goes to cinema; when I see the husband in a state of anxiety in an hour or two, I feel a strange and unusual sympathy for both of them.

The heroine of my stories wouldn‘t be the one who is grinding flour all the day and sleeps relaxed in the night.

I like the dirt of a prostitute, her illnesses, her crabbiness and her abuses. I write about them, and I ignore the well-mannered talk, health, and their clearness of domestic women. (qtd. in Agha 381)

Manto has presented the social and economic wretchedness of a prostitute in his short story ―Black Shalwar‖. The story specifically focuses on how a woman is forced to become a prostitute and lives such a shameful and ignominious life. Sultana becomes a prostitute only to make her both ends meet, yet her basic necessities are not fulfilled. Initially, she does the business in Ambala Cantonment where her life goes smoothly until she meets Khuda Bakhish, a coward and a superstitious man, who used to drive a lorry. She believed him a religious and spiritual man, which was the biggest mistake of her life. 168

Sultana is one of the prostitutes who is compelled by poverty to choose such a life. Everyone has rejected her, but only Manto has given her a status of a queen in his story. He has presented her as a part of God‘s creation which illuminates different layers of her dark life. To Manto, this facet of woman‘s life is the result of the oppression and despotism of society that, being a woman, she is so helpless that she has to become a prostitute. She is pure-hearted, true and sincere, although she is doing a job of social indignity and disgrace. In this regard, Sultana is a representation of all the prostitute characters of his short stories. In short, this story expresses the solitude of Sultana which is beautifully presented by the imagery and allegory of railway engines.

This story is character centred. The entire attention is focused on Sultana‘s character and Manto has successfully achieved his aim. It does not only depict the female prostitutes but also a male prostitute, Shanker, with whom Sultana feels good as ―he talks to her humanely and the conversation with him abated her grief; although, in her happy days she used to kick out the men like Shankar. In English terminology, Shankar is a ‗male prostitute‘‖ (Shireen 107, Self trans.).

The multiple meanings in Manto‘s stories cannot be explored by a single reading. There is very intricate and complex thematic development wrapped in apparently simple structures and a cursory glance would fail to gain the beauty of plurisignifications. Therefore, when a reader proceeds forward reading any story, the text often deconstructs itself. Sometimes these multiple meanings contradict each other. For example, the eponymous protagonist of ―Janki‖, even though living a poor life, adopts the filmy profession to earn for herself. In Peshawar, she had an affair with Aziz, but when she reaches Bombay, Aziz is substituted by Syed. Therefore, she does not believe in the ethics of marital life. She would have sexual affair with every man she likes without any hesitation. Her relation with Aziz is narrated in the story as: ―In the beginning the wistfulness that Janki shows about the Aziz, I thought, was just nonsense and fake, but I feel from her overbold talks that she really cares about Aziz. In fact, she wept after reading a letter from him‖ (qtd. in Agha 384, Self trans.).

Janki is a free-spirited woman who wants to live in the world like men, live beside them, not as an obedient but as coequal, enjoying sex, drinking, smoking, earning etc. Manto presents each of her affairs equally passionate and faithful. After Syed, she becomes equally involved in other affairs. Here Manto has illuminated an 169 entirely new aspect of female sexuality which was totally unconventional in that period. According to Wazir Agha, this story raises a question about female sexuality, that if a man can be sexually attached to more than one woman, then why not a woman (385)?

Therefore, Manto‘s stance and attitude towards women can be best understood from this story which deconstructs the conventional concept of female sexuality and her sexual relationships. It demystifies the conventional understanding of female sexuality which held it as merely passive and submissive. He thus brought forth a new definition of female sexuality which is more active and multi-dimensional. Instead of reciprocal power, Janki plays, simultaneously, a role of a mother, helper and a faithful wife. Like a train, she wants to connect with every engine. Her belief is extremely different from Sultana of ―The Black Shalwar‖. Sultana is waiting for an ideal engine (man) with which she wants to join for her entire life. Although, Manto has portrayed these characters in the same way and apparently there is a great similarity between the lives of the two protagonists, but deep inside there is a huge gap in their perceptions. Their wishes contradict each other. Manto‘s characters are always in struggle and conflict, first with society and then with themselves. This constant struggle makes them alive and Manto‘s pen renders them immortal. In ―Manto ka Tageir, Irtika aur Fani Takmeel,‖ Mumtaz Shireen also argues that Manto‘s characters conflict and struggle with society which shows us their inner moral conflict. Therefore, sometimes conscious or unconscious restlessness and confusion in them is evident. For example, Basit got control of his impulses, and Isher Singh, on the other hand, couldn‘t understand that how this restlessness and impatience in him came into being. (qtd. in Wani 116)

One of Manto‘s masterpieces, ―Hatak‖ (Insult), narrates the pathetic story of a prostitute, Sugandhi, who emerges as an extremely rebellious character at the end of the story. She lives in a dirty room with rags and dust all over. Her customers come and go but nobody notices the pathetic condition of her bed and room. ―No one had ever made her feel that she had a home that could look like a home, if she made an effort‖ (Manto 89). Her pimp, Ramlal, also does not care a bit for her. His only concern is to look after new customers for her in order to get his commission. He always taunts her for not taking money from a customer whom she liked. Being a prostitute, she is very compassionate to her customers, and she always ―lived in her 170 mind. But a soft word melted her immediately, and that spread to the other parts of her body as well. In her mind, she considered the union between man and women gratuitous, but the rest of her body thirsted for such a union‖ (Manto, BM 86). She had been living a life of prostitute for past five years without any halt or change. Life has become like a game of hide-and-seek for her. ―Sometimes she looked for someone, and sometimes they looked for her‖ (Manto, BM 87). She knows that being a prostitute she can never get true love. People come and go, nobody is there to talk with her and understand the inner depth of her heart. What actually Sugandhi needs is the love which a prostitute can never get in her life. Manto has succeeded in showing that there is a woman in a prostitute who is craving for true love. She is so lovable and sympathetic that her heart melts only by hearing ―Sugandhi, I love you‖. Though she knows that it is a big lie, she feels as if one really loves her. To be loved and to love truly is the only wish she has. ―Love -what a beautiful word! She wanted to dissolve it and rub it all over her body, or shrinks herself, crawl inside it and put the lid on. Sometimes, when the desire to love became very intense she felt like taking the man lying by her side into her lap and put him to sleep by patting on the back, singing lullabies‖ (Manto, BM 87). Though she was living in the hell of prostitution, she loved mankind and was eager to receive the same from others. The desire that someone would love her made her love everyone. She remained silent but her silence talked of many things. Her silent language was deep and effective. Manto was the initiator of the literature of ―Zindagi der Zindagi‖ in Urdu (Zafar 40).

Sugandhi was conscious of the fact that nobody among her customers would love her but she liked to remain in self-deception. She could never love and be loved; however, she would try to make it possible through self-deception by ignoring the reality of the world; or in other words, she was not perceiving it at all. She let herself be deceived with her eyes wide open. However, once, while looking in the mirror, she blurted out involuntarily: ―Sugandhi, the world has not treated you well‖ (Manto, BM 87). This was the expression of her suppressed feelings which would come out sometimes, especially when she used to be alone, thinking about her life, particularly her childhood.

The character of Sugandhi, though extremely realistic, is unique in the way she is different from other prostitutes. Generally prostitutes are stereotyped as fleshy machines that have no emotional interest rather than to count minutes for money. 171

Their eyes are watching the hands of clock and mind calculating the money. ―But Sugandhi of ―Hatak‖…is more a woman than a prostitute. That is why in the last five years no one of her customers became unhappy with her‖ (Shaharyar 48, Self trans.). She neither craves for money nor has any hunger for wealth. In the words of Mohammad Hasan: ―Sugandi ko rupiya pisa ka koi lalich nahi tha. Issay konsay mahal khada banana tha, jo rupiya pisay ka lalich karti‖ (N. pag.). (Sugandhi had no greed for money. She had no palace to build for which she could have become greedy).

Manto‘s characters in his stories, usually the people of lower strata of society, are generally considered as hungry and greedy, which, of course, would be a misunderstanding if taken in economic terms. They are hungry and greedy, not for money but for love and respect, and this is everything they crave for. Manto has very minutely and microscopically observed them and their relations with family and society. He has unveiled their sexual and psychic problems, particularly of the downtrodden women who sell themselves to meet their ends. Similarly, Sugandhi is an example of inner characterization of a prostitute by Manto. She does not have any greed for riches, but instead she herself helps other people in all aspects, even if it is the money which she is earning by selling her body.

Manto in his essay ―Safaid Jhoot‖, written in response to his trials, says that my Sultana does not have any greed for wealth. She catches fireflies to light up her shabby room. Light is there but she has to pay for it; had she been married she would get these things free. As ―she was just a woman,‖ she was labouring for the money that she needed (Manto, Kuliyat 339, Self trans.). However, Manto contradicts himself by saying ―Sultana is first of all a prostitute, then a woman, because in one‘s life the stomach has most importance‖ (Manto ―Safiad Joot‖ 347, Self trans.). This shows that earning plays an important role in a woman‘s life in liberating her from economic bondage. On the whole, Manto‘s concern for prostitute was a search for a natural ‗woman‘ and in Manto‘s words, ―Every woman is not prostitute; however, every prostitute is woman. There might be a time when a prostitute would take off her clothes and would remain only a woman‖(qtd. in Quddus 85, Self trans.).

The life of prostitute never runs smooth and there is always a threat hanging on of some sudden failure and misfortune. In Sugandhi‘s life also a storm came and cleaned off her all existence. When one night at 2 o‘clock in the morning Ramlal 172 knocked the door of Sognadhi‘s room, he yelled at her that a Seth, who was in his car in street, came for her. Sugandhi came out in a floral sari and some makeup. Her head was aching and her eyes burning with drowsiness and she was longing for sleep. Manto beautifully gives a description of the gloomy night, which acts as an objective correlative of her inner situation. The passage from the story reads as:

In the fading light and the absolute quiet of the late night, the shadow of the car made her feel as if the ache in her head permeated the atmosphere. The air she breathed also seemed thick and sour like the aftertaste of the brandy and beora in her mouth. (Manto MB 92)

When she reached near Seth‘s car, he flashed torchlight on her face and scornfully pronounced ―ounh‖ (oh no). The next moment Seth started the engine of his car and sped off. She could not understand what it meant. Ramlal‘s voice struck her ears, ―He didn‘t like you. Okay, I‘m off. Wasted two hours for nothing‖ (Manto, MB 93). Seth‘s words bruised her inner soul, tore her heart, and woke-up her long slumbering consciousness. It acted as a poison to her that spread without further ado in all her body. It awakened her inner self and she burst out for revenge. The ―ounh,‖ like a fire, burned all her sympathy and love for others. ―Ounh‖ is an aspersion for a woman. All of sudden she began to hate this kind of life. It looked horrific to her. She was angry with herself and especially with Ramlal who had robbed her respite, awakened her at two in the morning. She was enraged and her wrath liberated her from her illusions. Her entire glass palace of self-deception fell and broke into pieces. This story, therefore, talks about the debasement of women. The author wants us to feel what Sugandi felt and what the world would have been looked like when she was rejected by the Seth by pronouncing a cryptic ‗Oh no‘. In Muhammad Umar Memon‘s words, she faced the ‗gut-wrenching denial of her being…denial of who she was, by initiating a veritable ontology of selfhood‖ (Intro. to MNR xviii)

After somehow reaching her room, she felt as if everything was reverberating like the sound of ―ounh‖. A strong desire to observe the whole episode with Seth once more overcame her. She wanted to take revenge on him which is described thus:

Sugandhi would pounce on the Seth, scratching his face with her two hands like a wild cat, digging deep with all her nails, which were long as in vogue then. She would pull him out of the car and pulverize him 173

with her fists until she was completely exhausted…and when all her energies were spent she would sit down and weep. (Manto, BM 95)

She wished she could have cursed every single part of Seth‘s existence. She wished she could have torn off her clothes, stood before him stark naked and said, ―This is what you came for, didn‘t you? Take it all for free. But remember that whatever I am and whatever is hidden inside me, neither you nor your father can ever buy‖ (Manto 98). Here she is referring to the woman living inside a prostitute on whom Manto has stressed in all his stories dealing with the subject of prostitution, and who can never be possessed by a customer.

She now becomes thoughtful about the long period of the past five years in prostitution that hollowed her inner strength, strangulated her breathing soul and suppressed her brimming consciousness. ―Sugandhi, you are not ugly!‖ - a voice of her inner self and her real being, which could not be subjugated, becomes very clear. After examining all her years in the prostitution with a different attitude she learned how the society, which is basically male-dominated, treated her. It made her a slave by taking away her freedom. She desperately wished that ―all the pores of her body would open up and whatever smouldered within her would come out through them‖ (Manto, BM 97).

Madho Hawaldar, who was one of her betrayers, became the target of all her vengeance. She lashed out at him with all her anger. She broke all the pictures hanging on the wall of her room including Madho‘s and kicked him out of her room. She was left all alone in her room. ―There was a terrible stillness around her, something she had never experienced before. She felt every object drowned in emptiness... like a packed train, which after discharging all its passengers stands alone under the iron shade‖ (Manto, BM 104). Her revenge against men reached a climax when she picked up the mongrel dog in her arms and got on the large teak bed. Laying the dog by her side, she drifted off to sleep. This was her great insult to mankind. In other words, her mongrel dog was better than Seth, Ram Lal, Madho, and hundreds of others.

Sugandhi began to revolt against everything that had taken away her freedom. She revolted against the patriarchal society which had taken away the sleep of her nights to satisfy the lust of men. Her rebellion shows the awakening of consciousness in a woman who was bearing all the abuses and exploitation of men. Her every breath 174 resonated that any kind of oppression would not be tolerated any longer. Manto has made her the mouthpiece of all women, whether prostitutes or not, who have been suffering from exploitation in a male-dominated world. De Beauvoir has also commented on a prostitute‘s bold risk to revolt against the masculine control. She writes: ―The courtesan has the reputation of being frigid. [...] she risks suffering the control of a man who will exploit, monopolise, or make her suffer. [...] she expresses her revolt against masculine arrogance through her frigidity‖ (qtd. in Rosso 167).

In the first part of the story ―Hatak‖ (Insult) Sugandhi accepted her situation passively. Though she was aware of her situation from the very beginning, yet she consciously ignored the reality and lived in self-deception until her heart was broken by Seth‘s denial. She became rebellious and avenged her insult. It was Seth‘s grunt of rejection ‗ounh!‘ that made her cross the threshold of passivity to action. Madho Hawaldar, her lover, became the immediate target of her revenge because ―he happens to be a living symbol of the deception and betrayal that have characterized her life so far‖ (Asaduddin 28). As a self-respecting woman, Sugandhi could not bear insults anymore. She preferred following the painful and friendless path. Her dog became her new friend. At the end of the story and in Sugandhi‘s last satirical lines diverse conflicts amalgamate. The conflict of time has brought a major revolution in her and the other conflicts are hidden in her satire.

The story is significant from a feminist perspective in that it narrates through its central character Sugandhi how women have been victimized in the patriarchal society. It also demonstrates the rebellion of the oppressed against the system, as her wounded ego and self-respect erupt into the volcanic fire and burn all the meshes woven around her by men. After long endurance of pain, she burst out like the drop of a tear caused by deep agony. According to Mumtaz Shireen, Manto shows us a woman inside Sugandhi who was dormant until she was insulted by Seth‘s insulting remarks ―ounh‖. All of a sudden, her consciousness awakes and the woman inside bursts all of her anger on all those men who would exploit her, especially Madho Hawaldar (qtd. in Khatoon 33). Asaduddin describes her existential feelings as well as the feminist consciousness of being treated unequally as an ―other‖ thus:

Her preference for her mangy dog at the end of the story signifies her rejection of the illusions that have sustained her for so long, and her awareness of her existential loneliness. It is also her first step on a 175

voyage of self-discovery. Manto explores the deepest recesses of her mind through her stream of thoughts. Through its psychologically intriguing ending, Manto invests Sugandhi with a feminist vision that seems remarkable in the context of the time in which the story was written. (Introduction, BM 28)

The story explicitly expresses the feminist concerns. After reading it one does not hate prostitutes but rather one would sympathize with them for their pathetic condition. Manto‘s art touches a climax; it makes readers sympathize with Sugandhi‘s innocent desire to become a woman. Krishan Chander, who included Manto‘s ‗Hatak‘ in his ‗Naye Zaaivye‘, once remarked:

Manto has systematically projected the life of a prostitute and laid bare her sentiments, the soul, the inner and external situation of a prostitute. After going through ‗Hatak‘ one doesn‘t have a feeling of malice towards these poor women -prostitutes. Innocence of ‗Sugandhi‘ and her womanhood - all these elicited new feelings, those of sympathy. This is the hallmark of a great litterateur. (qtd. in Tamiri 37).

Manto‘s humanistic concern touches climax in this story which contains the ugly secrets of life and society. The character of Sugandhi is the incarnation of all those traits that a woman should possess. Her profession as a prostitute cannot efface the humanism, love, passion and desire from her heart. In this regard, Shakeelul Rehman calls Manto‘s stories as ―aria of humanitarianism; the aria that has been created on the highness of human characters, which is ecumenical and in various terms, immortal‖ (qtd. in Zafar 42, Self trans.).

Manto‘s another story ―Hundred Candle Power Bulb‖ highlights the tragic story of a prostitute who, like Sugandi, is forced by her pimp to remain awake all night. Besides Manto‘s sympathy for the downtrodden class of prostitutes, this story is a deep analysis of the condition of prostitutes and reveals their detestation and hatred for the profession. In this story, sleep is emphasized as something which dominates life as well as death. The prostitute character in the story wants to sleep and she is crying for it. But the pimp‘s voice crackles, ―I said get up! If you don‘t listen to me, I will….‖ Next, he changes his mood: ―Get up, my love. Don‘t be so stubborn. Just think… what will we live on?‖ (Manto, NV 88-89). She is really fed up with her life. She replies pathetically: ―Kill me if you want, but I won‘t get up. For God‘s sake, 176 have pity on me… Let the living to hell! I will die of hunger, if I must. Don‘t trouble me. I want to sleep‖ (Manto, NV 88-89). Lastly, she kills the pimp who was not allowing her to sleep. Rather he was forcing her to sleep with customers. The pimp was an obstacle between her and her desire for sleep.

When the customer - the man for whom the pimp was urging her to get up - saw the pathetic situation of the prostitute, he asked her ―Why is she subjected to this cruelty? Who is this pimp and what is her relationship with him? And why do they live in that room lit with a bulb that is certainly not less than a hundred candle power? How long have they been living here‖ (Manto 89)? She was never asked these questions by any of her customers. No one has bothered to ask her name. Who is she? How did she get into this hell? Because, everyone has understood her as a machine without any existence, defined and controlled by men. In prostitution men rule them as if they are machines, and treat them like machines. However, when the customer asks her name and where she is from, she replies, ―Nothing at all‖ and ―wherever you want me to be from‖ (Manto, NV 91). This shows that she is reduced to nothing and has lost everything she had. The identity she is given is imposed by every man. She can be called by any name one wishes to call her because the society she is living in has not given her any active role. She has to be submissive in a society governed by patriarchy. Thus, she requests him not to trouble her and says, ―I have been awake for so many days. I have been awake ever since I have come here‖ (Manto, NV 91). He sympathized with her and said to her that she can go and sleep. In a sharp tone, she said, ―I haven‘t come here to sleep; this isn‘t my home‖ (Manto, NV 92).

At the end of the story she rebelled against her exploiter, her pimp, who like Ram Lal in ―Hatak‖, was treating her like a machine to earn money for him. She smashed his head into pieces. Her agonizing and tormenting life made her take such a drastic step towards rebellion.

Manto has drawn a significant number of characters from the class of people who were associated with prostitution. Their characterization is both complex and sympathetic because he has demystified the conventional notions of morality and chastity, and ―besides highlighting the subjugated secondary status of women in society, such stories hold up a mirror to society‘s double standards in matters of sexual morality‖ (Asaduddin BM 24). Manto portrayed these prostitute characters only to show that they and their sexuality have been ignored. Asaduddin further notes: 177

If it is the male gaze, which converts a woman into a sexual object, it is society‘s collective indifference that reduces her to non-existence. Manto portrays these women as they are, and as the profession that they have been forced to engage in compels them to be, without maudlin or melodramatic sentimentality. In doing so he pierces the veils of pretense and hypocrisy which characterize male-female relationships in the Indian subcontinent. (Asaduddin, BM 25)

For unveiling very bravely the biased institutions of society, Manto has been accused of as a ―prince of pornographers‖ because he could speak ‗unspeakable‘ and ‗unmentionable‘ in the most forthright manner, without subterfuge and exaggeration (Asaduddin 25). He would always answer that ―literature is not a malady, but a response to malady. It is a measure of the temperature of the country, of the nation. It tells us of its health and disease‖ (Manto Dastaveez 85). He tried to highlight the blackness of society and reveal its body full of evils. In her ‗introduction‘ to Naked Voices, a translation of Manto‘s stories and sketches, Jalil quotes Manto thus:

I am not sensationalist, why would I want to take the clothes off a society, civilization and culture that is, in any case, naked? Yes, it is true I make no attempt to dress it—because it is not my job; that is a dressmaker‘s job. People say I write with a black pen, but I never write on a blackboard with a black chalk. I always use a white chalk so that the blackness of the board is clearly visible‘ (xvi).

His interest in the life of prostitutes had a very strong reason in that they represented the paradigm of middle-class exploitation. These subaltern classes of people in society were the victims of bourgeois, but on the other hand, they became the weapon of Manto to target upper-class people.

Another aspect of Manto‘s stories on the theme of prostitution is the alienation of his prostitute female characters. In society, prostitute lives a marginalized and ostracized life, which is apparently a ‗sinful‘ life, but they are not presented as godless creatures. Manto was puzzled when he observed that women in the sex trade are equally god fearing. They have great reverence for devotional icons and images, and also observe religious rituals. For example, Sultana in ―Black Shalwar‖ is a religious woman. The crux of the story is the uncertainty in a prostitute‘s life and her unbearable loneliness. As an ‗other‘ she lives outside the mainstream of respectable 178 society. The sheer boredom and ennui drive Sultana towards Shankar who exploits her situation at its most.

Manto‘s story entitled ―Loser All the Way‖ also highlights the miserable condition of prostitutes - their exploitation in society and suffering at the hands of men. However, the treatment of the subject is very different from the rest of his stories on the same theme. In other stories, man has been depicted as an oppressor and exploiter of these downtrodden women. However, in this story, the theme has been handled from a unique point of view. The male character in the story has earned a lot of money which he earnestly wanted to lose. Therefore, he would gamble and become obsessed with the desire to lose. He displayed a similar streak of winning and losing when it comes to women. ―He would pluck a woman from a brothel or a party, groom her to perfection, place her on the high pedestal of fame, and then after he had destroyed every last bit of her womanhood, give her ample opportunities to take her affections to another man‖ (Manto, NV 55). One day, he stopped his taxi beside an electric pole and saw an ugly woman, Gangubai, whom he had been observing for past ten days, sitting on a wooden settee, ―looking into a broken hand mirror and was engrossed in putting on her make-up‖ (Manto, NV 56). He promised her to give her ten rupees every night if she would close her shop, eat her dinner and go to sleep. He had only two hundred rupees in his pocket to lose. Every day he would stop taxi beside that electric pole and give her ten rupees. After few days, he saw Gangubai‘s shop open even if he had given her the money to close it. She was sitting on the settee in her cage, waiting for clients. He became furious and asked her why she broke her promise of closing her shop. ―You are bad,‖ he said to her. Gangubai replied: ―I am bad. But who is good here? Seth, you can give ten rupees and cause one light to be switched off, but look around you…see…there are lights everywhere‖ (Manto, NV 59). On turning his head he saw a ―never-ending row of grill-fronted shops and countless bulbs were flickering in the muddy night air‖ (Manto, NV 59). Gangubai questioned him, ―can you cause all these lights to be switched off?‖ ―No,‘ he answered. Therefore, the story, through a unique perspective, highlights the unending miserable situation of prostitution. Although, the story is not an exception on this theme; however, the male character (the unnamed protagonist) is very sympathetic towards women, and this sheds light on Manto‘s own character. The protagonist‘s care for Gangubai is obvious as he gives his money to her for not opening her shop 179 but for closing it. His single handed help can hardly change the system, but his care and consideration is an indicator of a serious step towards change.

Alongside his other subjects such as love, sex, incest, prostitution, rape, murder, patriarchy, Manto has given the world unparalleled masterpieces on the subject of the partition. In these stories he has revealed the realities which historians have missed out. In these stories, he narrates the bitter truths of female victimization during the partition and points out how the aggressive jingoistic fervour of partition was nothing but an ideological stance to give a free rein to the conventional phallic subject to use his power over the object – woman, the ‗other‘. He shows how during the partition the patriarchal power was exercised over women and through this deliberate and conscious effort, patriarchy became visible. Even if the victim is sometimes shown as mute like in ―Open it‖, her body becomes the signifier of various forms of violence inflicted upon it. She narrates whatever had happened to her during the riots only by a single unconscious gesture, and she will always be a signifier of an object of patriarchal violence.

In his partition story ―Open it‖, Manto has delivered a stinging slap on the face of humanity. He condemned the brutality of war and the actions of those who ignite it. Like every war, the partition of India and Pakistan affected humanity disastrously. Besides, the loss of economy, human life and many other things, the most heinous outcome of it was the brutal treatment of women. They were raped and killed and became the victims of an extreme violence and savagery.

Very little has been written about the experiences of women victims during the partition. The ―underside‖ of the partition was never brought into light; however, there are some survivors whose narratives reveal ―stories of women‘s mass suicides; stories of survivors turned away from home and family because they have been violated by those of the ―other‖ side‖ (Nagappan 79). Further, some creative writers have also filled the gap by narrating untold stories of female victimization. Suvir Kaul in his book The partition of Memories: The Afterlife of the Division of India asserts that ―sexuality and gender have a constitutive centrality here - as critical axes, they provide an understanding that does not simply supplement more orthodox historiography but interrogates and rewrites it‖ (qtd. in Nagappan 79).

Ramu Nagappan has raised a critical question about the female language, narrative and body: does a female have really a language of her own, through which 180 they can narrate the stories of trauma and violence of her body during the partition (79)? In fact one of many critical aspects of feminism today is to analyze history, focusing particularly on the violence against women during the partition. For example, writers like Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin have highlighted the untold stories of rape, mutilation and abduction. Manto has also treated the subject in many of his partition stories with extreme realism and truth. In this context, Mohammad Asim Siddiqui writes:

In almost all the stories of Manto about partition violence there is a reference to violence against women. Stories like ‗Sharifan‘ and ‗Thanda Gosht‘ immediately come to mind. In many cases, the women were not spared even by their co-religionists, a subject taken up by Manto in ‗Khol Do‘. (22)

―Khol do‖ (Open it) narrates the story of Sakeena, a sixteen or eighteen-year- old girl who got separated from her father, Sirajuddin, during the partition riots. He began searching for her, asking everyone if they had seen his daughter. But there was no response. They all would give him the confidence that very soon they would find her. Weeks passed by but there was no sign of his daughter. Then one day he found her in a hospital. She was lying on bed, half dead. He became very happy to see his daughter ‗alive‘. She was totally unconscious. The doctor, pointing towards the door- pan, asked Sirajjudin to ‗open it‘. After listening the doctor‘s words ‗khol do‘ Sakeena unconsciously responded by pulling her shalwar down, which shocked the doctor.

Sakeena‘s unconscious response to the doctor‘s words narrates the entire event of her victimization during the partition. It shows the plight she had passed through after she was separated from her father. It revealed the brutality she had faced. These unconscious responses narrate the tragic story of her life - how she was forced to do sex many times during the period of war. According to Asaduddin this story ―…highlights the fact that in times of fratricidal war and violence, the female body becomes a contested site subject to assault and conquest. It serves as a trophy of victory or a blot on the collective honour‖ (Introduction, BM 31).

In a very interesting article ―Manto Kash Tum ne Hamko Jana Hota,‖ Shaista Fakhri has highlighted the author‘s male dominant attitude while writing the short story ―Open It‖. She criticized Manto for his passive characterization of Sakeena. She, 181 according to Fakhri, has been portrayed without any spark of resistance and rebellion. The title of the article itself is a question to Manto, his representation of women characters, whom, according to her, he did not know very well. Later, the author of the article claims that through her father, Syed Mohammad Zahid Mian Fakhiri, a close friend of Upendra Nath Ashq, she learned about Manto‘s characters before she herself began reading his stories. She was shocked, particularly, when she heard the story of Sakeena. She had cried many times when she thought about the victimization of Sakeena. Further, according to her, Manto has not shown the sufferings Sakeena had passed through. How much she suppurated, moaned, squirmed and how many times she cried for help? Nothing is talked about in the text, she says (Fakhri 233-34)? Furthermore, she questions Manto regarding Sakeena; her exploitation that left strong traces on her unconscious mind. According to her, Manto was never bothered about the inner suffering of Sakeena and that is why he has not used a single word to describe her pathetic situation. Sakeena has been depicted as a totally passive character. Fakhri asks Manto:

Manto! Leave the discussion about ‗Khol Do‘. Why is it that the woman in most of your stories is only a silent spectator? Either she is raped, or becomes a prostitute, or she is thirsty and hungry for sex - but women also do think like you. Manto, see in your age - Mrs Abdul Qadir, Rashid Jahan, Ruqia Sakhawat Husain, Hijab Imtiyaz Ali, Ismat Chugtai... Tell truth, who were among you...Manto…but in your stories, leave the other women; you have not even presented a character like Ismat Chugtai… Manto, why did it happen like this? Is it because that in you too there was a dominance of a tanasha [dictator] man from the beginning? (Fakhiri 234, Self trans.)

Fakhri talks about her youth, about 26-27 years back, when reading Manto and Ismat was not considered good for women of respectable families because they thought that these stories would make them rebellious. But, it is true, says Fakhri, she too became rebellious after reading them. It was the revolt against the threat which held women from talking about their rights; revolt against that cognition which excluded them from (listening to) the discussion of men. We, she says, also rebelled against the prison where women were prisoners with their wings cut off so that they might not fly on their own (234-35). 182

However, Fakhri contradicts herself by saying, ―yes Manto, it is true that after reading and understanding your stories I too became bold‖ (235, Self trans.). Her first accusation of Manto‘s passive representation of Sakeen‘s character is somewhat genuine in that Manto has presented Sakeena merely as a passive victim of man‘s lust. But, the fact that Manto‘s final lines, in which he describes Sakeena‘s unconscious response to the word ‗Khol do‘, very clearly narrates her suffering cannot be denied. Her single gesture tells everything that happened to her during the days of riots. Further, Fakhri says that Manto‘s stories made her aware and rebellious against the age-long exploitation of women. They made her bold enough to claim their rights. Therefore, something is in Manto‘s stories that influenced her so much that she became bold. Manto, in other words, wanted women to become bold so that they could fight for their rights.

Fakhri‘s criticism does not end here. She connects Manto‘s personal life with his creative writings. She says that he never understood female psychology because ―he always remained a self-centred man…who wrote until his last breath, but it was only a mechanical action. His act of writing was everything for him, and perhaps he could not understand the psychology of his own wife, so how could he do justice with his other female characters‖ (238, Self trans.). At the end of her article, she says that Manto emerged as ‗male Manto‘ and his ‗natural man‘, using Mumtaz Shireen‘s terms, is a more coward than Manto himself. Further, Shamsur Rehman Farooqi, a noted critic, has also criticised the story for the passive role of Sakeena. He says that she has not been given a single breath to pronounce her trauma. ―Another reason for my grievance in ―Khol Do is,‖ adds Farooqi, that ―Kulwant Kaur nearly murders Isher Singh by stabbing him in the throat, but Sakeena could not have even uttered a single breath of revenge. I was not expecting that from Manto‖ (111).

Manto has portrayed Sakeena as a passive character; however, as a successful artist, he succeeds in depicting the various forms of violence through the victim‘s mute body. Her body becomes the signifier of all the victims of the dominant ideology which let loose the reins of violation and other exploitations during the trauma of the partition. Manto has expressed through the silent language of Sakeena‘s body what the words of language itself could have failed to speak of. His representation of her body becomes a symbol which clearly highlights the plight of women during the partition. 183

Furthermore, Manto‘s ―Khol do‖ has been found more significant than his story ―Thanda Gosht‖. The last three lines in it become three symbols. There are three reactions to the perversity of sexuality. ―First, there is an affectionate father, who in his customary moment of sense of honour smothers his own daughter‖ (Tang 51). Secondly, after roaming aimlessly in the deserts of distress, he avoids to look at the open reality; and thirdly, he experiences the heavenly happiness on finding his daughter alive. The author has portrayed a woman who, through the extreme human brutality, is terrified beyond imagination or consciousness. The response of Sakeena‘s battered body in the story has been illustrated through these words:

The doctor who had put on the light in the room asked Sirajud-Din, ―What is the matter?‖

All Sirajud-Din could say was, ―You see, I‘m That is - I‘m her father!‖

The doctor looked at the body on the stretcher and took her pulse. Pointing to the window, he said to Sirajud-Din, ―Open it up‖.

There was a movement in Sakeena‘s half-dead body. Her lifeless hand opened the top of her shalwar and pulled it down. The old Sirajud-Din shouted joyfully, ―She‘s alive, my daughter is alive!‖ The doctor was drenched in sweat from head to toe. (qtd. in Flemming 159)

In this context, Yusuf Tang makes an important point that this dreadful image is not the delight of sex but an expression of the tragedy of soul. It is a mirror to the inbuilt human reality (51).

Most of the writers during and after the partition made the trauma of Partition as the subject of their writings. But Manto revealed the ―naked truth‖ from a different and unique angle. The perspective through which Manto has seen the reality is unique. His approach is ironical, satirical and sometimes harsh, and it is one of the reasons that his stories have been misunderstood - for example, his story ―Thanda Gosht‖ is accused of obscenity. It was Dr. Syedullah who justified Manto in court by saying, ―after reading ‗Thanda Gosht‘ I became Thanda Ghost (cold meat), but … sadness was its effect…This story never provokes sexual desires...‖ (qtd. in Wadhawan Manto Nama 199). Commonly, the critics and readers have lost themselves in the sensuality of Isher Singh and the exposed body of Kulwant Kaur; 184 however, Manto has attempted to show us how Isher Singh‘s soul is stripped naked by a naked and dead cold body.

Isher Singh, the protagonist of ―Thanda Gosht‖, with a gang of looters, during the communal riots, looted some shops and houses before he enters into a house where he kills six men of a family and grabs a young girl and takes her to some distant fields to rape her and satiate his sexual lust. After raping her he comes to know that the girl was already dead and he had raped a dead body. To use Zizekian words, the dead body signifies a self-obfuscating ―Screen‖ which is meant to function as an obstacle or resistance that prevents the direct and violent access of a subject (Zizek 77). As a sign of resistance, the dead body of the girl can be seen resisting the extremity of sexual violence by a phallocentric male subject. Isher Singh, in Zizekian terms, can be called a pervert who craves for excess in every aspect of life, and according to Zizek, a pervert is always obsessed with sex to an unnatural extent. He goes far beyond the boundaries of nature. He aims to prove his male-domination and power of phallus, however, his patriarchal subjectivity encounters the ‗real‘ other in the form a dead body. The victim‘s dead body is the ―real‖ other of abjection, that is, exclusion, in terms of Judith Butler. Abjection means a ―degraded or cast out status within the terms of sociality‖ (Butler 243). Here, Manto unveils the violence underlying the asymmetrical relationship between the phallic subject and the other.

Isher Singh is sexually aggressive with his mistress Kulwant Kaur. He hurts her physically for which she admonishes him. He warns her to be prepared because there is going to be ―a lot of brutality‖ (Manto 26). The truth is that Isher Singh is unable to disassociate violence from his actions. Earlier, his lust remained unsatisfied as the girl was already dead and the defenceless other for his direct sexual violence. Thus he turns his violent intentions towards his mistress because for a patriarchal subject every woman is an object. Kulwant Kaur allows herself to be the object of his brutality. However, here too, in his ―false activity‖ (Zizek, The Plague 115) of sex with his mistress, he is unable to consummate the act because the image of the immobile, frozen girl flashes before his eyes. This immobile image of the frozen girl is so potent that it renders him impotent. On the confession of his gruesome act, Kulwant Kaur stabs him in his neck with his Kirpan (a kind of kife), a phallic symbol of power and justice. Hence, he became doubly a victim of his own phallus - by causing the symbolic death of his sexual potency and also his physical death. Hence, 185 this story clearly depicts how the existence of phallocentric male relies on violation of the body of the woman to maintain its illusion of power.

The story has been accused of nudity, sensuality and pornography; however, according to Prof. Ali Ahmad Fatmi, the truth is that it is not the voice of the story but a voice from an insightful conscience (34). The power of Manto‘s description is so forceful that sometimes readers are confused between the art and obscenity. Maupassant too has been attributed with the same quality that his words dance like hot meat. The following quote will illustrate it further:

It is often said about Maupassant that when he portrays a ‗searing and aphrodisiac [sexy] woman‘, the written pages convulse like the hot meat. Call it art or obscenity; if society has challenges to it then it is difficult to know the reasons…. The people who accused Manto of obscenity, perhaps their vision didn‘t go to the point that sex is used here as a placard or shock wave to arouse the hard conscience of the human nature. The greatest example of this fact is his story ―Thanda Gosht‖ (Cold Meant). (Tang 50-51)

Wazir Agha adds another interpretation to the story and, according to it, subjugation and oppression is its main focus. According to him, the central character of the story is unnamed, without any existence ―a beautiful girl‖, who is the symbol for all downtrodden women in the subcontinent. She avenges the man who transformed her into cold meat (death), by making him sexually impotent. So the transformation of Isher Singh was her revenge at the psychic level. His physical murder has not been emphasized as much as his sexual coldness by the dead beautiful girl. However, according to Wazir Agha, ―the total effect of this story is not by the Kulwant Kaur‘s sexual violence or man‘s violence but the oppression of a beautiful girl‖ (Agha 388).

Therefore, in most of his partition stories Manto has shown how the female body as a passive object became the target of violence. Besides various other stories about prostitution and sexual perversion of women, Manto‘s partition stories also depict acutely the violence and sexual trauma of women during the havoc. They became the sport of patriarchal ideology, whether by physical force or psychological hysteria. These stories can be called as ‗stigmatexts‘, a term coined by Hélène Cixous in her book Stigmata: Escaping Texts, referring to the literature which retains and 186 revives the violent experiences inflicted upon an individual‘s body. The stories, such as ―Cold Meat,‖ ―Open It,‖ ―Price of Freedom,‖ (I Swear by God) etc., are partition stigmatexts which narrate the stories of various characters who became the ―real‖ other. Here ‗real‘ is not reality but refers to something constitutively absent from reality, as defined by Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and cultural critic. These stories unveil the history and portray the hidden realities filled with ―paradoxical laws, non- dialectizable discontinuities, absolutely heterogeneous islands, irreducible singularities, unheard-of, and incalculable sexual differences‖ (―Choreographies‖ 67), as illustrated by Foucault.

The violence captured in the stories by Manto can be stated, in Foucauldian terms, as a result of patriarchy in which ideology and power are two inseparable elements. The tortured bodies of women during partition clearly reveal the ideological grounds of patriarchy behind the violence. These stories signify the ‗stigmata‘ of violent experience in a phallocentric society. According to Manto, one has to write to highlight the society in which he is living in, because to him, ―literature is the pulse of community - literature gives news about the nation, the community to which it belongs, its health, its illness‖ (Bhalla 72).

Not only his partition stories but Manto‘s other stories also focus on women‘s exploitation. A very powerful short story ―By the Roadside‖ presents an oppressed and exploited woman, deserted by her lover, even after she had given him both her body and soul. The story is narrated by an unnamed character; unnamed because it signifies someone who is without identity. Ironically, she satisfied her lover to the extent that he does not need her any longer. When she asked him about the desertion, his reply was: ―without you I would have been incomplete… I don‘t know what else to say to you… I feel sated… completely satisfied. I feel I don‘t need you anymore‖ (Manto, NV 9, trans. Jalil). He leaves her forever. She only wanted to know the reason of his cruel decision of leaving her. His words to her were so cruel that she could not endure their scorching pain. Like a serpent that bites and slithers away, leaving the trace of the body behind, his words left indelible marks on her. She cried but it had no effect on him. She questions him: ―These particles and atoms you talk of - they were once part of me. As I have given away parts of myself to you, am I not missing those fragments today? In making you complete, have I not emptied myself? Did I make 187 you my all, my God, my Idol, for this‖ (Manto, NV 10)? He answered her philosophically, connecting God‘s creativity and objectivity to that of a honey bee.

The honey bee sucks buds and flowers off their nectar to produce honey but it never lets the honey touch the lips of the flowers it has drained. God lets the other worship Him; He never accepts another as His master. He spent a few moments alone with Adam and created the universe, but where is Adam today? Does the universe need him? Adam was like the mother who destroyed herself on the very bed on which she gave birth to Creation. (Manto, NV 10, Trans. Jalil)

What could she do? She could not do anything except to cry for her fate. According to Manto ―Woman can cry but she can‘t argue‖ (Manto, NV 10) and this portrays the real situation in which a woman is living in. This is the real predicament of a woman in society. Society has not given her the rights that she can argue about. Manto has portrayed the female character very weak, docile, silent, submissive and oppressed. This story lacks the rebellious aspect of woman for which his other stories are known for.

The momentary pleasure that her lover gave her, he thought, is enough for her that she should remember for all her distressful life. He believed that it would be sufficient for her to support her rest of the life. This misogynistic attitude of the male character and the phallocentric and patriarchal behaviour prevailing in the society is highlighted in this story. This becomes more obvious when the male character in the story asserts:

I am a man - today you have completed me; tomorrow someone else will do that. I am made like that. I shall often find myself wanting to feel whole and complete. There will be other women willing to fill the empty spaces in my being and make me feel whole and strong again and again. (Manto, NV 10, Trans. Jalil)

Emphasizing the condition of women who are considered as the objects of pleasure, replaced after being used by men, this story emphatically lashes out at the social system - symbolically representing an unequal social structure. The story depicts many horrible experiences of a woman in the male-dominated society. Sometimes she would think that why she gave herself so completely to him? And why 188 he always remained whole and strong, whereas she was left cracked and broken. He emerges stronger and she becomes weaker (Manto, NV 11).

Therefore, ―By the Roadside‖, though it thematically deals with sexual identity, is very different from Manto‘s other stories because the theme of sexual identity in this story is not about a pimp, prostitute or any other underworld character, but about an unspecified and inarticulate woman. She is trapped by a fake lover who impregnated her, deserted her, abandoned and left her alone. She questions the power which the society has given to man only to oppress other. She questions: ―Whose law is this? Earth‘s? Heaven‘s… or that of those who made it?‖ (qtd. in Flemming 101). She is exploited and cheated. The story ends with an innovative and a favourite technique of Manto: a newspaper cutting to describe the discovery of an abandoned but still a living female child with blue eyes by the side of a road. The story exclusively is based on the biased and unequal relationship between men and women. In this regard, words of Leslie A. Flemming are noteworthy:

Though from a feminist perspective, one might question the image of women becoming incomplete (adhura) from sexual relations while men are fulfilled, nevertheless, of all Manto‘s stories treating the psychology of sex, this one has the widest appeal and the most sensitive treatment. (102)

In this context, and from a feminist perspective, Manto‘s stories show his sympathetic attitude towards the socially marginalized and oppressed ‗other‘. He has peeped deep inside their psyche and revealed their pathetic existence. By using the stream-of- consciousness technique he conveys the woman‘s feelings thus:

My soul is drenched with sweat…Every pore of it is open. Fire blazes on all sides…Gold is being melted in the crucible inside me…The bellows are working. The flames burst forth—gold boils over like the lava of a volcano. Blue eyes are panting from running around in my veins…Bells are ringing…Someone‘s coming…Someone‘s coming. Close, close the door. (qtd. in Flemming 102; )

Manto would always think about the creation of humanity. According to him, both the spirits (male and female) were created equally and their union caused the creation of the universe. Later on man created and constructed society, governed by the rules systematically in his favour. He rendered his equal partner as the ‗other‘, but 189

―why does one spirit sometimes get bruised and damaged and left behind? Is it so punished because it had allowed that other spirit to reach zenith? What sort of Creation is this‖ (Manto, NV 11)? Manto is questioning the basic irrational, irreconcilable realities of our existence, resulting from the actions of our biased institutions. Similarly, the motherly experience and worries are described beautifully and empathetically as:

Why are the empty spaces in my body filling up? What is this debris that is filing up the dips and hollows of my body? What is this susurration that is coursing through my blood? Why is it gathering momentum and racing towards one single spot in my womb? Why has my sunken boat bobbed up to row across unknown seas?

Who is this unknown guest for whom milk is being warmed on raging fires inside my body? Why is my heart carding my blood to prepare baby-soft blankets, and for whom? Why is my mind weaving new clothes out of my multi-coloured thoughts, and for whom? (Manto, NV 11-12, Trans. Jalil)

She is afraid of the conventions of society that always point its finger towards woman, as Khaled Hosseini so beautifully puts it in his A Thousand Splendid Suns, ―like a compass needle that points north, a man‘s accusing finger always finds a woman‖ (Hosseini 7). The voice came to her ears saying, ―The Womb is the crossroad of the world. Why do you want to break it in front of the whole world? Remember, fingers will be raised and pointed at you‖ (Manto, NV 12). Further, she says in reply to the question why society always points fingers at women and not men:

Fingers will be raised when the oyster opens its lips and the pearl slips out to land on the pavement. Then, the fingers shall be raised—both at the pearl and the oyster. And these fingers will turn into snakes and bite both and turn them blue with their venom (Manto, NV 13)

The child, pearl from her shell, is taken away from her. She cries: ―Return the flesh of my flesh to me…Don‘t snatch this piece of my soul‖ (Manto 13-14). At this stage she does not care about the societal attitude towards her and rebels against biased patriarchal system and oppression. She says, 190

The finger…let them rise! I shall cut them down. There shall be uproar. I shall pick the chopped fingers and stuff my ears with them. I shall become dumb. Deaf and blind. The flesh of my flesh will understand my every gesture and I shall recognize it with my fingertips. (Manto, NV 14)

The sky acts as a symbol of the society where man dominates woman. ―It is as though two clouds meet in the sky: one bursts out crying while the other turns into a thundercloud, plays with the raindrops and flees after unleashing a few bolts of thunder and lightning. Whose justice is this? The sky‘s? The earth‘s? Or His who made the two?‖( Manto 11). The system of society, symbolically the sky, is further described thus:

The sky was blue like his eyes—clear and sparkling—as it is today. Why did it not fall down? Where are the pillars that hold it up? Was that day‘s earthquake not severe enough to shake them to their very foundations? Why is the sky still stretched over my head, as it was then? (Manto, NV 13)

In ―License‖, Manto has satirized the social institutions which subjugate woman and construct their identities. It is a realistic story which probes deep into patriarchal society and highlights the inequality and injustice done to women. It narrates Niti‘s struggle to make her ends meet. As a widow she tried to earn her livelihood by driving a coach (chariot) which her husband used to drive. He would earn enough to sustain his family, but misfortune struck his life, he died and his wife suffered the most. Firstly, she hired Dino as the driver of the chariot but he proposed her for marriage which she could never think of. She took back her husband‘s horse and coach from Dino. She thought, ―‗What if I was to drive the coach myself?‘… ‗What‘s the harm? Do women not toil and do manual labour? Here working in mines, there in offices, thousands working at home; you have to fill your stomach one way or the other!‘‖ (Manto, MSS 86, Trans. AatishTaseer).

Niti sets an example that women can also earn if they are given an opportunity. This was against the social conventions and male-dominated rules. She began to drive the coach herself. 191

At first, Nesti shied away from male passengers, but she lost her shyness and began to take in an excellent income. Her coach was never idle, here passengers got off, and there they got on. Sometimes passengers would even fight among themselves who had stopped her first…They [male passengers] would make her go aimlessly from pillar to post, sometimes, cracking dirty jokes in the back. They spoke to her just to hear the sound of her voice. Sometime she felt that though she had not sold herself, people had slyly bought her anyway…But she was unperturbed; her belief in herself kept her at peace. (Manto, MSS 86-87)

One day the municipal committee of her area revoked her license, simply for being a woman. According to them, women cannot drive coaches. Niti pleaded and asked them that why women could not drive coaches? ‗They just can not,‘ was their irrational reply. This is just one instance of the inequalities highlighted in the story. The story also raises the question as to why women should be barred from social, political and economic streams of life:

Niti said, sir, then take my horse and coach as well, but please tell me why women can‘t drive coaches. Women can grind mills and fill their stomachs. Women can work in mines… to earn their daily bread. Why can‘t I drive a coach? I know nothing else. The horse and carriage was my husband‘s, why can‘t I use them? How will I make ends meet? My Lord, please have mercy. Why do you stop me from hard, honest labour, what am I to do? Tell me. (Manto, MSS 87)

After hearing this, the officer replied indifferently: ―Go to the bazaar and find yourself a spot. You are sure to make more that way‖ (Manto, MSS 87). The next day she submits her application for a license to sell her body. The absurdity of the prevailing system of the society is that she is given a license to sell her body but not for driving a coach. So, in a patriarchal society, woman is stopped from earning independently for nothing but she is given a recognized license to sell her body. She is considered as an object of flesh which can be sold and bought in every market of the world. She does not have any individual identity. Thus, this story is actually an extreme satire on powerful social institutions of patriarchy. These institutions reduce the identity of a 192 needy woman into a commodity. She is not accepted as a person who can earn like man because that way she could not satisfy the lust of man, and therefore, she is forced to become a prostitute by providing a valid license. Hence, the story clearly shows how women are economically, socially and sexually exploited.

In ―The Price of Freedom‖ Manto explores the manner in which phallocentric institutions wield control and violence over the female body, and how the ideology of patriarchy generates a discourse to subjugate women. In the story, a freedom fighter, Gulam Ali, wants to marry a girl named Nigar before getting arrested. Therefore, he seeks the blessings of a well-known Babaji who becomes the main focus of Manto‘s criticism in the story. Babaji rejects his wish of getting married on the grounds that it would weaken one‘s patriotic zeal. Later on, he allows them to marry but he forbids them from any kind of sexual contact because, according to Babaji, a woman is a symbol of indulgence and evil and her body is a deliberate distraction for freedom fighters.

The character of Babaji and his exercise of power and knowledge can be identified with Michel Foucault‘s concept of panopticism. His overall character illustrates the panoptic function of patriarchy. The concept of panopticism was employed in prisons for surveillance, but gradually these techniques came to be applied to social regulation and control. In the story, Babaji‘s ashram is very much like the Foucault‘s ‗prison‘, a metaphor for modern disciplinary society founded on the concept of power, knowledge and body. Babaji is controlling everything and is acting as a centre of whole society. He is the only one to decide who has to get arrested and what is to be done next. The most obvious yet passive victim of Babaji‘s oppressive dictums is Nigar. She is a voiceless victim, who passively acts without taking her own decision. She is not given any opportunity to express her own desires. She becomes the object of both the ideology of Babaji and the wishes of Gulam Ali.

Nigar‘s body is reduced to a mere womb and a means for Ghulam Ali to achieve the goal which he considers the true purpose of his life. Hence Gulam Ali is presented as a primordial phallic subject who gains power only in association with the objectivity of the other. Nigar‘s existence is reduced to nothing as she is trampled by the desires of the two patriarchal powers, Babaji and Gulam Ali.

Manto‘s woman characters have different roles in his stories - daughter, sister, mother, friend, wife, prostitute etc. He has also depicted them with various facets. 193

Even in prostitutes, motherly affection does not go away from a woman. Janki, Mami, Sharida, etc. are some powerful examples. In this context, Mumtaz Shireen claims that in the second period of Manto‘s writings, his woman characters belong to everyone and ―even if she is a prostitute, she proves a complete mother and wife… they have all the qualities of a mother and wife. It is the situation, age and society which do not allow them to be mother and wife‖ (Shireen 90). The motherly affection can be seen utmost in the character of Janki who though apparently does not want to become a mother but has a motherly attitude towards her friends. She cares for Aziz like a mother cares for her child. Mumtaz Shireen argues that:

Janki selflessly cares for other people. With a lot of compassion, love and motherly affection she benefits her male friends very much. She is continuously evolving from the Janki who has lost her bodily status; so, both physical and psychological aspects of Janki are important. Manto has time and again turned our attention to Janki‘s Shalwar, and it becomes famous like Black Shalwar. Thus the Shalwar, always hanging on a chair, becomes a symbol of Janki‘s flirtatiousness and psyche, which bears the stamp of every prostitute. (92, Self trans.)

Her affectionate and caring nature proves her more a mother than a prostitute and this is the reason that she left Aziz for the bed-ridden Syed because at that time Aziz needed only her body, while Syed needed motherly love and care.

The warmth of motherliness sparkles in every prostitute of Manto‘s stories. They are prostitutes at a superficial level but deep inside them they are full of motherly affection and other womanly virtues. In Zeenat, Janki, Sharida, Mami, Shoba Bhi etc., both prostitute and mother are alive simultaneously. Shoba is the best example among them. Inside her lives a mother who cares for her child for whom she has become a prostitute. In this context Mumtaz Shireen says:

In the life of a prostitute, wealth and material luxury are the most valuable things, but she was so careless about them in that she left her jewellery worth thousands and even her car to Doctor Khan which she never thought of taking back. (99, Self trans.)

Prostitute‘s motherly affection in her pure heart is what Manto highlights in most of his stories. Especially the character of Shoba is full of motherly affection. If 194 the mother inside her would not be dominant, she would continue living as a prostitute, but her child‘s death took away all from her.

Another significant quality of Manto‘s art of characterization is his portrait of some jealous women characters. These characters are soaked in blood. They will not take a calm breath until they paint their hand in hot blood. These characters are so powerfully depicted that their action makes readers shiver. For example, Manto‘s ―Behind the Reed Stalks‖ is a story full of revenge and jealousy. The female character of Halakat has been highlighted for revenge. She had already committed a murder and would not hesitate to do another. She killed Nawab, her rival, and cut her into pieces. The revenge and jealousy led her to extreme brutality that she made Nawab‘s mother cook her daughter‘s flesh. Such a horrific image of woman‘s revenge presented in the story can also be seen in some of the horror stories of Maupassant. Halakat could not share her husband, Haibat Khan. She completely dominated him, and so he wanted to escape to Nawab.

The entry of Halakat, and in fact her every action, is dramatically portrayed. Due to her obsessive nature she would always imagine her husband walking towards Nawab. Before she murdered Nawab she had already murdered her first husband. She confessed to Haibat Khan as:

‗My darling, this is not the first time but the second, may now God bless my husband with heaven. He was unfaithful like you and so I killed him with my own hands and made crows and vultures eat his cooked flesh… because I love you, so I instead of you‘…. She does not complete her sentence and took away the blood-spattered bedcover. Haibat Khan wanted to cry but his voice did not come out of his throat and he fell unconscious. (Manto 21, Kuliyat Self trans.)

Manto has created three parallel female characters (based on revenge and jealousy) which have sharp emotions, sexual rivalry and timely propulsion. These characters are Kulwant Kaur in ―Thanda Gosht,‖ Rukma in ―Parhte Kalima,‖ and Halaqat in ―Sirkandu‘n ke Peeche‖. These are his best revengeful characters but their actions seem far removed from reality. In the words of Mumtaz Shireen, the mishaps in these stories come into the category of ―improbable possibility,‖ that means the impossible possibilities happen (Shireen 77). ―Behind the Reed Stalk‖ has some improbable incidents. For example, how Halaqat came to know about the relationship 195 between Haibat Khan and Nawab and if she somehow came to know but why would then Haibat Khan come to that place (Behind the Reed Stalk) with her. Another improbable incident in the story is the murder of Nawab. She is chopped into pieces and then cooked, still her mother could not know about her daughter‘s murder. In this context, Waris Alvi points out that:

In our short stories, both before and after Manto, we can see a lot of such characters who in their sinful lives present a very pleasant map of innocence. If Nawab would have been presented just as a swindler, self-centered and cruel, or she would have been described as feeble- minded or abnormal, then her character would have been different and her murder would not have been the murder of innocence as shown in the story. (Alvi Manto eik Mutala 92, Self trans.)

Another fine story by Manto entitled ―Nikki‖ highlights the same sort of revenge and retaliation; however, the subject of female oppression and subjugation is more dominant. In fact, the whole story is based on the psychological implications of suppression and domination. It is a story of an eponymous character, divorced by her drunkard husband after long ten years of oppression and violation. Since she is a ‗round character‘ she changes throughout the story. Her husband had made her suffer for ten years. She had silently and passively endured all his oppressions without any retaliation or revolt. As the story opens, her condition is described thus:

After the divorce she became free of care and anxiety. Rid now of the continual bickering and abuse, her life assumed peace and quiet she had not known before…Nikki‘s husband was cruel, feckless and inconsiderate, he drank heavily, womanized and was addicted to drugs, spending a great deal of his time at places of ill-repute. (Manto 167)

Further:

For ten years Nikki had stifled her emotions, curbing feelings that had not known any release. There had been repression because years and years of training has taught her to accept her fate; a husband‘s command was equivalent to the law of God. (Manto 168)

She was supposed to accept every command of her husband. She was a brave woman who did not express her distress to anybody. But it had bad effects on her. The 196 suppression had affected her unconsciously, and later on, when she was free from her husband, the neighbours became her target. She began to dominate the whole neighbourhood. The ten long years of domestic hardship and violence made her resistant to physical as well as psychological sufferings. ―Gradually Nikki established herself as a woman of power among the women in her neighbourhood‖ (Manto 168). Nikki soon became so powerful that she started a business of helping others in their fights as they would offer her money as fees. Sometimes she would regret this profession, but ―what could she have done, she thought. If she had not created a position of superiority among the women in her neighbourhood she would have become a nobody, and she had suffered subservience long enough while she was with her husband; she could not have tolerated being exploited any more…Then she became obsessed with the game‖ (qtd. in Flemming 171).

Owing to her bitter past experiences, Nikki wanted that her daughter, Bholi, should not learn to become a dutiful wife; rather she wanted her daughter to reign like a queen in her husband‘s household. When her daughter grew up old enough to get married she began to search for a bridegroom for her, but she was rejected everywhere. She was being hated by everyone in her neighbourhood and beyond. Even her own daughter would feel the same as her neighbours felt. This tormented her most. ―Nikki was being driven out of her mind by these thoughts. Memories of the ten years spent with her husband Gam began to haunt her; the images of bitter and unhappy experiences crowded her brain‖ (qtd. in Flemming 172). Her husband‘s suppressed mistreatments began to permeate the corners of her mind. She fell sick and her sickness became entertainment for others. The coming of neighbours to her house made the situation worse. She began to shout: ―I know you very well…No one would treat an enemy the way you have treated me… I slaved for my husband for ten years…he beat me until I was sore but I did not complain… and now you are being cruel to me…‖ (174). Further, she mumbled with a smile:

God, I know this God too. I have known him a long time…what kind of a world did You create? What world is this where people like Gam are allowed to exist….O Gam…O God, do not hit me…O God…O Gam!‖ (174)

And muttering ―O God, O Gam,‖ she died. 197

Manto has written this story like a psychologist. He has depicted horrible sufferings of a woman who is ill-treated by her husband. This story narrates the age-old saga of domestic violence inflicted on women.

The issues of women and their sexuality are not limited to Manto‘s short stories alone, but he has also written various influential essays which thoroughly discuss their identity, existence, rights and above all, their victimization. In his ―Beautiful Girls will be Harassed‖, he states:

As long as men are put next to women, this harassment will happen. There might come a time when women‘s existence is no longer necessary for men and this will stop by itself. But not before that time is this going to end. (WIR 38-39)

Further, in his ―Our Progressive Graveyards,‖ he ironically praises the west for bringing its own excellent culture to India:

Many excellent things have come to us from the culture of the west. What has it not brought to us uncivilized Indians? It gave our women the sleeveless blouse. Also lipstick, rouge, powder. Hair dyes and depilation. It‘s a gift of civilization that a girl may now take a license to prostitute herself. She can marry under a civil act and divorce under it. (WIR 55)

Similarly, his various other articles and essays are satire and criticism of patriarchal social structures which treat women merely as sex objects. For example, Manto‘s ―Virtuous Women in Cinema‖ talks about the life of prostitutes - what makes them sell their bodies? The issue of virtue of women that has been taken up by Manto is also found in the stories of Maupassant. Why is it that women are demanded to be more virtuous than men in society? What does being virtuous actually mean?

This essay was written by Manto during his early phase in the movie industry. Manto, as himself being associated with cinema or Bollywood, explains how tawaif or her kotha and the movies are strongly interlinked. The basic question which highlights the issue of women being virtuous is: should women of virtue work in movies or not? The people who raise this question are called ―guardians of morality‖ by Manto. These guardians wish to remove immorality by removing the women of the street from film industries. Manto says that removing the women of the street from the film 198 industries does not mean that the market for the sale of women‘s bodies for pleasure will end. These moral guardians forget that these fallen women too were sometimes ‗only women‘. They are forced to sell their bodies. He says,

Prostitutes are really the products of society. Then why do we raise the demand for putting an end to them, when they form a legitimate part of our culture? If they are to be reformed, then we must also reform all other work that is associated with the body (Manto, WIR 155).

Like a clerk or an alcohol seller who spends his entire day in working in order to feed his belly, a woman too does the same but the method is different. But why we should, Manto says, show our hatred and contempt towards the women only. Surely, her circumstance does not deserve such hatred or contempt. The good women are good ―because of the social conditions in which they were brought up. From the security of their home, they enter the financial safety of their husband‘s home. They are at all time‘s distant from the rough ways of the world‖ (Manto, WIR 156). Contrary to this, in the words of Manto, a woman who does not have a father‘s shelter on an education or other so-called civilized facilities ―is like a broken pebble from a pavement‖ (WIR 156).

Manto questions the state of being from a ―good‖ family. What is it that you mean by ―good‖? He says: ―A woman, who honestly puts her wares on display, and sells them without an intention to cheat, is such a woman not virtuous‖ (WIR 157)? Manto is concerned with the nature of reality whether it is presented by so-called virtuous woman or by fallen woman. There is a great demand for a woman‘s body in the market and consequently, the fallen woman is reduced to a market commodity. Her identity is constructed as the ‗other‘, and she is always defined in contrast to man and that too negatively. In his piercing words Manto says that:

If a thing is in demand, it will always enter the market. Men demand the body of women. This is why every city has its red light area. If the demand were to end today, these areas would vanish on their own.

Our classification of women, this naming and branding them as prostitutes is in itself wrong. A man remains a man no matter how poor his conduct. A woman, even if she were to deviate for one instance, from the role given to her by men, is branded a whore. 199

She is viewed with lust and contempt. Society closes on her doors it leaves ajar for a man stained with the same ink. If both are equal, why are our barbs reserved for the woman? (WIR 156)

The sexual encounter, particularly in prostitution, is actually a ‗violation‘ of a woman, as shown in Manto‘s story ―Hundred Candle Power Bulb‖ because none of his prostitutes is willingly or for pleasure‘s sake in this profession. They all are victims of a man-centered society which is forcing them to do it. In this particular story, the female protagonist beseeches the pimp to let her sleep; however, his refusal of it proved much dangerous at the end and she smashed his head with a brick. She rebels against her oppressor and her rebellion against patriarchy is much extreme than Sugandhi‘s.

Many critics have criticized Manto‘s stories. They accused him of presenting the sexual encounter of poor women for the sake of sexual pleasure only. Thus his stories present an incomplete picture of a woman. However, Saghir Ifrahim in his article ―Manto ke Khalq Karda Jism Farosh Kirdar‖ very clearly opposes these accusations about Manto‘s depiction of woman by saying that those who accuse Manto never think that whenever Manto has written on sex he is not writing it for sexual pleasure, rather he wants to highlight the sexual violation of downtrodden women (56).

3. Conclusion

In most of his stories Manto has satirized the society for its biased and patriarchal system. He was conscious of the fact that women in every culture are treated unequally. Manto wrote against this inequality and exploitation. He supported the idea that women should enjoy equality in every sphere of life and should walk shoulder to shoulder with men. For example, in ―Ismat Chughtai‖, one of the Manto‘s best character sketches, he wants every woman of the world to be bold like Ismat Chughtai. They should be given equality in every field of life without assaulting their femininity. He expresses this idea in the following words:

I reflected, let the women fight head and shoulders with men on the battlefields, let them excavate mountains, let them become story writers like Ismat Chughtai, but their palms should be adorned with henna. Bangles should tinkle on their wrists. (227 BM) 200

Moreover, Manto wanted the eradication of the binary opposition of ―man/woman‖ in society. He raised his voice against institutions and other powerful structures that have created these biased differences. People are exploited on the basis of sex and gendered identities. They are categorized as if they are things. Manto‘s observation of gendered division created out of biological differences can further be seen best in his sketch ―Ismat Chughtai‖. He writes,

I consider it vulgar to label people as ―man‖ or ―woman‖. It is ridiculous to put up signboards on mosques and temples declaring that they are houses of worship. But from an architectural point of view, when we compare them with residential dwellings, we do not ignore their sacred character. (238 BM)

In short, the subject of women‘s equality and rights and especially the characterization of prostitutes had been dealt with by many authors before Manto, but his uniqueness and individuality in this subject lies in his presentation of the various aspects of the life of a prostitute with extreme sympathy. In his stories a prostitute is first a woman then a whore. She is the embodiment of love, sympathy, affection, care etc. The most sympathetic and affectionate facet of her is the facet of a mother. Manto did not want us to sympathize with the prostitute but with the woman who is inside her and this woman can best be recognized as a mother. Although by profession all prostitutes are the same, yet in Manto‘s stories they have individual existence; they are not categorized as types. Therefore, one can say that Manto was the ―champion of the poor, the deprived and oppressed‖ (Wadhawan 126). Moreover, when oppression and insult reach to an intolerably extreme, she emerges as a powerful rebel against the dominant structure. This kind of female characterization is often seen in Manto‘s stories whereby a woman, too much suppressed and exploited by patriarchal structures, either secludes herself from man such as Sugandhi in ―Hatak‖ or physically revolts as in ―Hundred Candle Power Bulb‖. Her rebellion is much effective when she counters his gaze and renders him either psychologically impotent as in ―Cold Meat‖, or bereft of his manliness as in ―Khushiya‖.

On the whole, Manto‘s feminist message can best be expressed in his own words: ―Prostitutes are not born, they are made‖ (Manto 156), which, like Simone de Beauvoir‘s ―one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman‖, demonstrates the social construction of a ‗female‘ into ‗woman‘, ‗sex‘ into ‗gender‘, and ‗woman‘ into ‗prostitute‘. 201

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CHAPTER VI

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Representing Female Sexuality through Male Gaze: A Comparative Study of the Select Short Stories of Maupassant and Manto from Feminist Perspective

“It takes us no time to understand Maupassant, because who else is there, a short story writer like him other than our Manto”. ~Mumtaz Shireen

Outline

This chapter is a comparative study of the select short stories of both the writers from feminist perspective, highlighting the similarities and contrasts of their female representation. It builds up the background by analyzing the female representation in their respective periods, and then it discusses the western influence on Manto as far as his subject of female sexuality is concerned in order to draw a line of comparison between Maupassant and Manto. Their stories, which speak against the oppression, exploitation and gender construction, represent the complex female sexuality. It also discusses the masculinity crises, the encounter between male and female gaze. Lastly, it talks about how the boundaries between the conventional male-dominated institutions of home, marriage and prostitution are blurred and rendered very fragile and fluid

1. Female Representation in the Second-half of the Nineteenth-Century French Literature and First-Half of the Twentieth-Century Urdu Literature: An Overview

Fin de siècle and Maupassant

In his book Boundaries of Acceptability: Flaubert, Maupassant, Cezanne, and Cassatt, Sharon Johnson demonstrates how the works of French writers of the second half of nineteenth-century have either blurred or strengthened the space between both 207 the sexes, because of which separate public and private spheres were created. Her invaluable research reveals how the cultural and other social ideologies of that period had subordinated women. In the nineteenth-century, the bourgeois ideology strengthened the binary oppositions, especially those of class and gender.

These varied representations of female sexuality were reinforced during the age of industrialization, which segregated the political, social and economic domains on the basis of gender. Public spheres, mostly dealing with the economics, have been declared as masculine. While feminine space would be ‗residential, reproductive and human‘. Again, the unchallenged masculine domain became ‗industrial, productive and mechanical‘ (Johnson 12). This binary gendered construction became so powerful that even feminists of fin de siècle in France ―glorified the home as the natural site for its bourgeois women‖ (Johnson 13-14).

De Beauvoir in her The Second Sex mentions that France was ahead among the countries where feminist revolution took place (129). However, female servitude continued and she was a ‗thing‘ for pleasure. She was given place in arts where men used her for fulfilling their own fantasies. Even during the military dictatorship of Napoleonic Code, she was enslaved and her fate was sealed for a century which further closed the door of emancipation for her (Beauvoir 129). Most specifically, during the 1880s in France, living as well as writing were sexually coded in highly specific ways. Women, restricted in the four walls, were considered as the ‗unintelligent beings‘, born only to please and destined only to the matters of love and heart. Her sexuality continued to be defined by man. The fin de siècle witnessed ―a cultural landscape given over to terrifying metaphors for sexuality‖ (Kaye 53), with a ―complex and sometimes contradictory constellation of differing movements and comprehensions of sexuality unique to the late-Victorian period‖ (Kaye 54).

According to Patricia Stubbs, ―women and sexual relations [were] at the heart of the ‗nineties short story‖ (Stubbs 106). Writers like Maupassant, Vernon Lee, Sara Grand, Victoria Cross and Menie Muriel Dowie were conscious of the changes that were taking place. They have written candidly on the question of woman and her sexuality. They are read together and the only thing which brings them together is precisely their expression of female erotic subjectivity. According to Ann Heilmann, all these four authors succeed in ―attacking the sexual objectification of women‖ (NWS 38), though the strategies they employed were at times different, especially 208 with regard to motherhood and virility. Besides highlighting the institutions which objectify woman‘s sexuality, their stories also convey the fear of woman on being given subjectivity. Further, in their stories they have shown birth and death as an opportunity to reflect on artistic creation and reproduction. This creative element serves to lay emphasis on women‘s role within society as subjects who create as opposed to objects that are created and moulded by a superior masculine creativity or Western bourgeois society. However, in this context, Sharon Johnson sites some works, including Maupassant‘s short stories, which have been written against the grain of these divisions created by Western bourgeois society. Maupassant has, on the one hand, attempted to subvert the traditional representation of gender and class by questioning the set and defined roles assigned to male and female in society. However, on the other hand, he too has created binaries and gendered divisions especially in his those stories which are based either on his Algerian experience and on the theme of degeneration of woman which was common in that period.

Among these writers, Maupassant is called a modernist. His treatment of themes, such as female subordination and other ideological blurring during the period became one of the reasons that made him a modernist. His shocking and bold subjects in an innovative form are the essence of modernity in his writings. Although, his stories highlight the dominant hierarchical structures in the society, yet the contradictory discourse in his stories tends to weaken the dominant force of patriarchy. According to Foucault, ―contradictory discourses related to social mores can weaken a society‘s dominant ideology‖ (qtd. in Paliyenko 382). Maupassant‘s ―Une Partie de Campagne‖ (A Country Excursion) can be cited as the best example to see the weakening of the dominant ideology, and this story subverts the idealized space of nature by blurring the binaries like rape/rupture, nature/culture etc. Similarly, his other stories also depict the nineteenth-century bourgeois norms against which they have been written. It was a conscious attempt by Maupassant to subvert those prevailing bourgeois patriarchal norms and to change the social and economic conditions of women of that era, says Sharon Johnson (180).

Woman has been given a kind of ‗space‘ in literature which only serves to define the male identity. She has been objectified in different roles. Without subjectivity and voice, she has been portrayed as weak, submissive, voiceless, degenerative, unintelligent, horrible, seductive, sensual etc being. However, with the 209 rise of the ‗New Woman‘ in France and other European countries, she has been given a new ‗space‘ and subjectivity to define her sexuality. Illustrating female objectification in literature, Maupassant‘s reply to the astonishment of M. Francisque Sarcey about the inclusion of courtesans and strumpets especially in the literature of nineteenth-century is apt:

Now, woman has two functions in this life: love and maternity. The novelists, perhaps wrongly, have always regarded the former of these two functions as being more interesting to their readers than the second, and they have, for of all, studies woman in the exercise of the profession for which she seemed born. Of all subjects, love touches the public most. We have been particularly interested in the woman made for love. (qtd. in Boyd 118)

In this way, Maupassant explains how the character of woman is portrayed in literature as an object only for love. Considered as having limited intelligence, she has been given very restricted roles in society, and her position in society depends only on the man to whom she is married. Maupassant‘s concern regarding this issue has been aptly described by Ernest Augustus Boyd in his books Guy De Maupassant: A Biographical Study as:

There are profound differences of intelligence amongst men, the result of education, environment, and so for them. With woman it is not so. Her role in life is restricted; her faculties remain limited; from top to bottom of the social scale she remains identical. Women of easy virtue become remarkable women of the world in a short time, once they are married. They adapt themselves to their environment….

Women are not divided into classes. They have a place in society solely because of the men who marry them or push them. Are men always so scrupulous about a woman‘s origins when they take her as a companion, legitimate or otherwise? Must we be more so when we take them as literary subjects? (qtd. in Boyd 118-119)

Thus the question of woman, her identity and status in society was clearly uppermost in Maupassant‘s consideration. He was aware of the fact that there had been horrible injustice done to woman. She, without having her own identity, is 210 considered as dependent on man. However, truly an enigma as has been earlier noted about Maupassant, the representation of woman in his stories also demonstrates a kind of complexity, which this chapter endeavours to analyse through a thematic comparison with Manto‘s representation of woman in his short stories.

2. Manto’s Individualism and Western Influence

One of the fundamental characteristics of comparative literature is to show the influence of one language, culture and author on the other. Being interdisciplinary, international and cross-cultural, it endeavours to look for a systematic relation between different cultures, languages and literatures.

Similarly, there exists a strong relationship between the writings of Maupassant and Manto. The influence of European literature in general and Maupassant‘s in particular on Manto can be seen even in his early writings produced during his translations of Russian and French works into Urdu. The European literature was introduced to him by Bari Alig, a major influence in transforming Sadat Hasan into Manto. In his article ―Manto par Europi Afsana Nigaru ke Asraat,” Prof. Zahoor Din has traced in detail the influence of European writers on Manto, particularly French short story writer Maupassant (Zahoor Din 46). The works of Wilde, Maupassant, Chekhov and Hugo, in particular, made an everlasting mark on his career. The first literary achievement was his translation of Hugo‘s Play The Last Days of a Condemned into Urdu, and later on, he began translating Wild‘s play, Vera. During this period, he read a lot of French and Russia literature. The short story, the most powerful genre during the second half of nineteenth-century, influenced his writings both stylistically and thematically. From the translation to the creative writing, it was the western influence that helped him to revolutionize the genre of the short story in Urdu literature. Though he was a born short story writer and the art of story-telling was very well known to him, yet he could not escape the influence of various French and Russian writers. His love for European classical literature of nineteenth-century was immense. Leslie A. Flemming, in her introduction to The Life and Works of Manto discusses the European influence on Manto as:

Manto was indeed heir to the legacy of nineteenth century European fiction. In general, two aspects of Manto‘s approach to the short story bear the marks of European influence. The first is his overwhelming 211

preference for sympathetically portraying characters oppressed by social institution… Among them [Russian Writers], Gorky, about whom Manto wrote a long biographical essay was a special object of his admiration. From reading both Gorki‘s and Maupassant‘s works, Manto developed an interest in portraying lower class life. Like Maupassant and Chekhov, however, Manto consciously adopted an objective stance toward the subjects of his fiction, realistically and accurately depicting the conditions of their lives without suggesting any means of ameliorating their difficulties.

The second aspect of his approach to the short story that Manto inherited from European writers, especially from Maupassant is his preferences for the well-structured plot. In general, Manto usually avoided both Chekhov‘s impression and his narrow focus, instead constructing balanced, well delineated plots which often contained, like those of Maupassant‘s unexpected endings. (37)

Therefore, as a kind of inspirational source for him, the European influence on Manto cannot be ignored. Maupassant, in particular, has been considered his mentor and fictional father. Besides the style and technique, there is much common in their writings. Often their point of view in presenting common life and the crises in human nature is quite similar.

Manto, also known as the Maupassant of India, to use Mumtaz Shireen‘s words, has presented the common life with an understanding of human nature that is very similar to that of Maupassant, especially when presenting the fierceness and wildness in it. Mumtaz Shireen has studied both the writers comparatively and she asserts that the real beginning of the modern short story in French and Urdu literature started with both the writers respectively. Being realist writers they have depicted the realities of their times. ―Maupassant‘s art created stories out of life‖ (qtd. in Shireen 118, Self trans.) and this can be also said about the writings of Manto too. They do not have any philosophy; however, their idea of life and its simplicity is their real treasure which they have preserved in their stories. The concepts in their stories are always earthy, talking about the conflicting and contradictory relations of real men and women. They shock readers by the representation of the naked truth of society. They never put clothes on society, because, as Manto once said, it is not his job. According 212 to Mumtaz Shireen, Maupassant also knew the secrets of life and humanity, but his representation was always outer, lonely and submissive (121).

Both Maupassant and Manto have presented things very bravely, candidly and clearly without any hesitation. They have left no obscurity and ambivalence in their writings. In this regard, Mumtaz Shireen comments: ―Maupassant has a habit of narrating directly, clearly, simply and with a sharp wit. He has created stories as if pieces of life have been sliced easily‖ (118, Self trans.).

It becomes very difficult for one to judge between the two as to who is the greatest as both have greatly influenced the genre of short story in their respective literature and even extended it to literature across borders. On the one hand, we have stories such as ―Mademoiselle Fifi‖, ―Boul de Sauf‖, ―Maison Teller‖, ―A Country Excursion‖, ―The Necklace‖, ―Useless Beauty‖ etc., and on the other hand, we have ―Insult‖, ―Open it‖, ―Odour‖, ―Black Shalwar‖, to name a few. Both the writers were the trendsetters of theme, style and technique in the short story genre. They were experimenting innovative ways of narrating stories. There is no other short story writer equivalent to Maupassant like Manto. Therefore, according to Shireen, ―It takes us no time to understand Maupassant, because who else is there, a short story writer like Maupassant, than our Manto‖ (119-20).

Both the writers strongly believed that humanity is beautiful. Even if, sometimes, it appears base and dirty, yet they always searched light in the darkness and beauty in the ugliness. In this regard Shireen has compared their outlook in the following words:

After reading Maupassant, the formation of the overall picture of human[ity] is that even if evil, ugliness, dirtiness and bestiality are present in human being, but still humanity is beautiful. In Manto also, particularly in his stories of the second period, the same picture of human being is there. Manto‘s subjects, like Maupassant, are related to the savage and agitated passions of human beings. Also, sexuality, sensuality, tyranny, quarrel, riots, sharp agitated passions in extraordinary events are present in both of them. (121-22, Self trans.)

Therefore, Manto‘s concept of ―Imperfect Human‖ as illustrated by Mumtaz Shireen is an embodiment of vice and virtue, good and evil, high and low at the same 213 time (134). It has great resemblance to Hemingway‘s concept of ‗hero‘, who can be defeated but not destroyed, and who always strives in life. Typically, they are the people of lower class. The best example of ―Imperfect Human‖ can be Manto‘s character, Babu Gopinath. His other characters such as Sugandhi, Zeenat, Janki etc., can also be included in the same category. Their apparent sinful professions as that of a prostitute and pimp cannot dominate their powerful inner characters of sympathetic mother, father and wife. Hence, they are the symphony of different notes and, therefore, they cannot be judged by their profession alone.

Manto accepted Maupassant as his master. In fact, his art shaped Manto‘s art of writing stories and style of writing short stories which he imbibed as his own. However, before stepping further into this account of the Western influence on Manto in general and Maupassant in particular, it is pertinent to note that although he was influenced by the Western writers and had studied their theories and followed their style and techniques, yet he himself a born artist and his stories are not mere imitations of his Western predecessors.

In his article ―Maupassant and Tolstoy ka Nazriya-e Fanoon-e Lateefa,‖ Manto clearly says that Maupassant was closest to him amongst all the Western writers whom he had read very passionately. Particularly, his influence can be traced in Manto‘s later stories in which like Maupassant he has presented the brutal and horrific images of humanity. In this context, Mumtaz Shireen says, ―Manto‘s attitude is similar as Maupassant‘s in shocking through his writings by unclothing life and human beings, and their ruthless heinous feelings‖ (113, Self trans.)

However, the Western influence never dominated Manto. Neither did Freud overcome him nor did Manto hold Marx‘s finger to follow him blindly. Woman and her sexuality remained the main subject for both Maupassant and Manto on which they have written in the same manner, but both have their unique originality in telling stories. Moreover, they sometimes present their point of views in which they contrast and differ from each other. Generally, Maupassant has pointed out the degradation and dirt in the apparently polished women of gentle class; whereas, Manto could see the goodness and sympathetic heart inside a prostitute who was marginalized and oppressed by society. However, both the writers had similar ideas of the concerns of humanity. Both believed that human being is the corpus of evils but humanity has always been beautiful. 214

3. The Modernist Manto

The period of Manto‘s literary life, approximately from 1936 to 1954, was the ―heyday of a hugely influential radical cultural movement‖ across India (Gopal 1). During this period one of the important landmarks that revolutionized and modernized the Urdu literature was the formation of the All-India Progressive Writers‘ Association (PWA) in 1936 by a diverse group, including Manto, which believed that art, literature, and film could ―help and shape and transform the nascent nation-state in progressive directions‖ (Gopal 2). These writers were committedly writing for social change and national construction. Issues of woman education, the treatment of widows and cast reforms were mainly emphasized in the progressive literature. Hence the ‗radical changes‘ were taking place in India, and literature was the major instrument for achieving it.

Apart from caste and other social issues, the issue of gender and sexuality plays an instructive role as far as ‗representation and reflexivity‘ is concerned in Progressive literature. Although women‘s empowerment has also been dealt in early works by writers such as Rashid Jahan, Ismat Chughtai and Manto; however, ―each of these writers would come to think about gender in relation to their own complex subjectivities as writers, political thinkers and social beings‖ (Gopal 5). Therefore, gender occupied constitutive importance more than thematic. In other words, ―themes with a more familiar connection to the ‗woman question‘ - education, domesticity and familial politics - came to intersect with questions of citizenship, political responsibility, labour, sexuality, class, caste, religion and ethics‖ (Gopal 5).

Manto did not only explore the female exploitation and degradation by representing prostitute in his stories, but his exploration of masculinity and its crises also forms another core aspect of his works which distinguishes him from his contemporary writers writing on ‗the woman question‘. Manto‘s fierce individualism also distinguishes his art from the Progressives who were ―busy trying to connect men and women‘s social and economic status to their characters‘ lives and to provide systemic solutions to their problems‖ (qtd. in Gopal 100). Though he certainly has a relationship with them, it was never clear as Progressive writers themselves had been hardly a homogenous group. Further, Manto has discussed it in his essay ―Taraqqi- Pasand Socha Nahin Karte‖ (Progressives Don‘t Think), Priyamvada Gopal noted that ―Manto‘s work ranges from complex psychobiographical vignettes to stories that are 215 just as simplistic and ‗vulgar‘ as some of those written by the ‗social engineers…turned litterateurs‘ that some critics find so appalling‖ (Gopal 100).

Praised by Salman Rushdie as ‗the only Indian writer in translation whom I would place on a par with the Indo-Anglian…a writer of low-life fiction whom conservative critics sometimes scorn for his choice of characters and milieus‘ (52) (it reminds us of Maupassant who was also criticised for the choice of depicting low life), Manto was the torchbearer of unselective humanism. Selective application of human values was the real problem that the country was facing that time, as suggested by Rashid Jahan in her story ―Will the Accused Please Stand‖. The selective application understood some as truly human and other as less so, which also reminds one of Gorges Orwell‘s best description that ―all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others‖ (90).

In fact, it is the fire of humanism that was burning in Manto which made him an insurgent writer. He was different from his other contemporary writers as he rebelled for the inherent freedom of human beings. His rebellion against the current moral codes and rules and other social obstacles was only for the defence of his ―connatural being‖. This concept of human by Manto was different from the common idea of human in modern literature at that time. According to Mumtaz Shireen, human being, after 1936, was mostly known as a ‗political being‘, but this transformation, from political person to connatural person, was an act of ratiocination and cognition (44).

Manto‘s human is first and foremost a natural being, who wants to live a life free from every social and moral obstacle. He fights for his freedom, but social conventions and moral obstacles come into his way and consequently, he becomes a victim of various sins. These frustrated characters of Manto are falling more and more into the hell of sin and evil. Manto did not hide anything; rather he, with acerbic truth, presented their life with an extreme verisimilitude, claims Shireen (152-53).

Like his characters, Manto‘s own character is an example of his connatural being, which is an amalgamation of both good and bad - a natural human being. In one of his essays entitled ―The Great Pothole Mystery‖ Manto introduces himself as: ―You know me as a writer of fables. The courts know me as a pornographer. The government sometimes refers to me as a communist, and at other times as one of the 216 nation‘s great literary figures‖ (WIR 133). But he considered himself first and foremost a human being and the ―proof of this resides in the fact,‖ Manto says, ―that I have a good side to me and a bad one‖ (WIR 133).

As a rebel, Manto was longing for the freedom of the lower class people, especially the freedom of prostitutes. He employed the subject of prostitution and sexuality against the social and moral conventions because these were considered taboos in that period. Sex and sexuality was not something new to be talked about. Writers and philosophers have been talking about it for ages, starting from Greek, Asian, Egyptian, Roman and other European countries. From the ancient world of Plato‘s Symposium and Aristophanes‘s myth of human origin, described as a world of ―before sexuality‖ (qtd. in Mottier 4) by historians such as Michel Foucault, Paul Veyne, David Halperin, and John Winkler, to the repressed state of sexuality during industrialization in West and present Modern period, sexuality and its power controlling regimes, as Foucault concludes, has been ―originally, historically bourgeois‖ (127). Foucault in his History of Sexuality says that sexuality has always been a highly charged ‗transfer point of power‘ not only between men and women but also between an administration and its population, and prostitution, being one of the key aspects of this power transfer and sexuality, has an important role to define sexuality. Therefore, regulating a prostitution has been always a masculine adventure, as Edward Said would point out in the colonial context, ―a male power fantasy‖ in which native women ―express unlimited sexuality….are more or less stupid and above all…are willing‖ (Said Orientalism, 207).

However, in Urdu Manto‘s stance was radical and revolutionary on the subject, though prostitution and female sexuality had been dealt with by many writers before him. In this context and against those who criticised him for promoting sexuality and obscenity into Urdu literature, Manto‘s words are noteworthy. He says, ―Those people who understand sexuality as a creation of new literature are wrong because it is sexuality that gave birth to new literature‖ (qtd. in Shireen 16, Self trans.).

Manto was basically a moralist because none other than a true moralist could have presented an immoral world only to distinguish good from bad and sometimes amalgamation of the two. In this context, Shireen writes: 217

A true moralist always depicts an immoral world because he puts us on our guard against the world as it is. The moralist always frightens because he is true and truth is frightening to man. (qtd. in Shireen 163)

4. Representing Female Sexuality

Sexuality has never been free from historical and socio-political mechanisms of power and knowledge. This is the main argument expressed by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality. According to him, there is an intricate knot between the three regimes of power, knowledge and pleasure as per the history of human sexuality is concerned, and repression has been ―the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age‖ (Foucault 5). Foucault, further, explains how sexuality has been concealed within the sprawling body of statements over time in Western history. In other words, how sex as an idea or natural entity has been ―put into discourse‖ (Foucault 11) in the constructed history of sexuality from Ancient, Middle to Present Modern ages. The ―repressive hypothesis‖ by Foucault states the repressed state of sexuality during industrialization in West which made it more increasingly public existence from last three hundred years. Therefore, sexuality has been institutionalized and a complex relationship developed between sexuality and knowledge. For example, the knowledge of sexuality was limited to Church during the Middle Ages, and severe codes and penalties were observed for any transgression. During the industrial revolution in Europe, new scientific and commercial institutes defined the regimes of sexuality. Later on, it also became a kind of touchstone for any kind of inquiry or analysis about psychological problems and mental diseases. Therefore, in the modern society, sexuality occupied a significant place, and around it all the axes of social, political, economic and psychological intersected. Sexuality, therefore, become a new mechanism for controlling individuals and populations, a mechanism of domination and an instrument of hegemony.

Mottier at the very outset in her book Sexuality says that sexuality cannot be understood as a natural experience or something which is purely out of cultural processes. She says further that,

Sex is a cultural object. Just as the differences between men and women cannot be reduced to biological factors alone, but are more adequately understood in terms of the concept of ‗gender‘ which takes 218

into account the social meanings that different societies attach to masculinity and femininity, sexuality is not a natural, biological, universal experience. (Mottier 2)

Therefore, sex and sexuality is not a natural force, but over the period of time different social, political and many other forces have influenced it so much that it has become the most ambiguous and crucial subject to deal with. Literature has been a very powerful tool in both putting sex into discourse and deconstructing the discourse of sexuality. As a cultural process, literature has often presented female sexuality in contrast with male sexuality. The male gaze in literature has been central as far as female representation is concerned and in bifurcating sexuality in separate divisions of male-female regimes. This male gaze, with sensual desire, often describes the nudity of female characters, even if it is the description of their clothes, to foreground their sexuality, fulfil their gaze and seduce the male readers (Rosso 61-62). The male gaze often tries to objectify the woman as sensual and thus effects the natural sexuality by constructing it in his ideal representation.

The representation of women in the works of Maupassant and Manto is quite similar, if not quite the same. As both are male authors, they have used the male gaze to present female sexuality, but sometimes these women characters have been positioned to shatter the conventional idealized structures and fixed roles. Therefore, the image of woman in their works is ‗complex‘ and ‗multi-dimensional‘, as opposite to the almost ‗mono-dimensional‘ and ‗fixed‘ figures of the ―Angel in the house‖ which was considered as ultimate embodiment of the purity, morality and asexual wife and mother in earlier art and literature, particularly during the Victorian Age. It was actually in the latter half of the nineteenth-century that a powerful discourse emerged on the complexity of female sexuality. Their presentation was bizarre. They were described as animals. Even in the art and literature, their representation was depicted in animalistic images and figures. The texts of the period show the constant struggle between rationality and instinct, desire and duty, and the female sexuality was defined on the basis of these dichotomies. Hence, the dichotomies prevalent during the period, especially in art and literature, regarding the ‗woman question‘, ‗female representation‘ and ‗female sexuality‘ are noteworthy. Most importantly, a pattern of rationality and logic presented in the literature was shaped by putting one against the other - men against women, ‗good‘ women against ‗fallen‘ women, lover 219 against the mother and lover against the wife etc. This proposition of Victorian social order has been meticulously studied by Ann Ardis, Professor in English, the University of Delaware, in her books such as Women‘s Experience of Modernity, 1875-1945 and Virgina Woolf: Turning the Centuries.

However, in the same period, woman, who had been portrayed as meek, powerless, self-sacrificing and pure throughout history, was getting new impetus by Nineteenth-century French writers including Maupassant and the ‗New Woman‘ writers of Britain. Female sexual awakening and subjectivity then became the common issue during the period about which both male and female authors were writing. As a victim of both marriage and prostitution, the parallels were created to highlight the complexity of her sexuality, which the society has apparently and so easily defined. Maupassant, who is often tagged as a misogynist, rather depicted female character and her sexuality by giving individuality and subjectivity to her personality.

As a disciple of Gustave Flaubert and practitioner of realism, Maupassant often would go far beyond the limited spectrum of subjects. As Katherine Kearns has noted that realists desire ―to see beyond forms traditionally recognized as aesthetically permissible‖ (3). He has discussed his realistic approach in his preface to Pierre et Jean. Some of his stories also present people from every sphere, without bifurcation on the bases of sex and other class divisions. His stories realistically represent the contemporary society of his times.

Many scholars and critics of Maupassant have related his stories with his personal life and a preconceived notion about his works confused them about female representation in his works. Similarly, people misunderstood Manto and they could not believe how he could be just while depicting the oppression and violence of prostitutes. Critics have equated him to a pimp because he visited brothels. Moreover, they would accuse him of obscenity and pornography. But, in reality, he was sympathetic towards them. The only purpose for which Manto would go there was to know about harsh and naked realities of their lives. Like other writers of the era such as Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, Manto faced a great challenge in developing the aesthetic to present the great contradictions regarding female sexuality. Keeping everything in view, one can very well understand the struggle and the problems he faced in maintaining his ‗individuality‘ in his art. 220

Unlike Henry Miller, who promoted certain philosophy along with sex and his approach brings out disgust in us rather than pleasure, Manto‘s approach was pure which brings neither pleasure nor disgust to readers. He was rather a surgeon and his story a clinic. He treats sex simply as sex - neither a disease nor a cure, but a natural phenomenon which a normal human being cannot deny. According to Salim Akhtar, his stories such ―Phaha‖, ―Bu‖, ―Khol do‖, ―Thanda Gosht‖, and ―Upar, Nichay aur Darmiyan‖ work like a laboratory in which we see slides of experiments with sex (2). Salim Akhtar further adds in his article ―Is Manto Necessary Today?‖, translated into English by Leslie A. Flemming, that:

The approach to sex was a significant innovation for the Urdu short story, particularly because Manto did not see sex as some situation separated from ordinary life in his stories. Rather, it was his genius that he was able to understand and explain life with reference to sex. Sex for him was neither shameful nor accidental but rather an eloquent metaphor for informing the human psyche and a simile for manifesting both beauty and baseness of life. Moreover, sex operated on two levels in Manto‘s stories. On one level he brought out the inconsistencies of life through sex. On another level sex became a means of protest. (Akhtar 2)

Both the authors have presented different dimensions of sex, female sexuality and female characterization. They have stressed on woman‘s right to knowledge of sex, its pleasure and most important of all, the choice. A double standard towards sexuality prevails in every society. Particularly in the late nineteenth-century, the views were highly subjective and political, whereby the sexuality was considered both respectable as well as deplorable - ‗lady‘ and ‗prostitute‘, associated with love and sex respectively. Maupassant‘s stories show how love legitimates desire by associating it with it‘s nobler, more civilized qualities. The conflict between love and sex can be seen in the writings of both the authors and they have attempted to annihilate the division between the two.

Another common dimension of female representation in their stories is the amalgamation of love, desire and animalism. As a result, they have portrayed woman as often driven by her instincts rather than by her reason. Maupassant‘s many Algerian stories present the woman characters of ‗the dark continent‘ in highly 221 sensual and animalistic language and imagery. According to Beauvoir, naturally women react to sexuality: some of them choose to embrace animalism of sex completely, while others if they are in love and are loved, the only way for them is to submit themselves to a man (574). Maupassant and Manto have presented both the reactions of female sexuality. They have shown some choosing animalism while others passively surrendering to men.

In Maupassant‘s era, the trend of presenting woman as a source of degeneration was given significance. Rachel Mesch, Associate Professor of French Chair, Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures, in her influential book The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle, has also pointed out that ―in many naturalist novels [...] female sexuality was a primary theme, and was represented as a source of danger or the locus of social degeneration‖ (6). It was thought as their inherent trait which passes from mother to daughter and also passes on to other women. Thus, sexuality and desire, through the male gaze, are shown as something closely associated with one‘s ancestry. Against this stereotyping of female sexuality, the feminists and the New Woman writers emerged. Their first preference was to write against this degenerative discourse of man, and according to them, ―notions of innate female moral superiority, for instance, were very important‖ (Rowold xvii).

Maupassant has been criticised for some of his short stories which depict certain objectionable themes related to lower class female characters. He has given them neither virtue nor honour. He has also depicted woman, like most of his contemporary writers, as sexual, sensual, instinctual etc. In an article, ‗La Lysistrata Moderne‘ (Modern Lysistrata), published in La Gaulois on 30th December 1880, Maupassant wrote viciously against women and their intellectual inabilities. Tamar Garb in his article ―Self-representation in the case of Marie Bashkirtseff‖ has given a detailed description of Maupassant‘s intervention into an ever-intensifying debate on women‘s rights, which was stimulated by the feminists of the late 1870s. Highlighting Maupassant‘s resentment against women whom he thought as intellectually weak to produce any artistic masterpieces, Garb further writes:

For de Maupassant, woman‘s prime function was to please; his female characters (with the unique exception of Mme Forrestier in Bel Ami, who in any case is not a principal character but a foil for her successive 222

husbands) never show any intellectual interest or ability, such concern being outside of their legitimate and natural sphere…Woman‘s true power lies in being Man‘s inspiration, the hope of his heart, the ideal always present in his dreams. Women‘s only legitimate right is the right to please, her true domain and arena of power is that of love, and any granting of political rights to women would serve only to demean their legitimate sovereignty in affairs of the heart. (118-19)

Philip G. Hadlock also states that Maupassant is known for ―his highly unfavourable attitude towards femininity‖ and insists on ―the objectification and victimization of women which have come to be associated with [his] portrayal of […] female characters‖ (281). Perhaps it was under the strong influence of Schopenhauer that his views on femininity turned negative during that period, particularly in relation to his negative presentation of women and ‗gender duality‘. Regarding Schopenhauer‘s philosophy, de Beauvoir comments that:

He is right in seeing in the sex/brain opposition the expression of man‘s duality. As a subject, man asserts himself in the world, and, remaining outside the universe he asserts, he rules over it; in seeing himself as flesh, as sexual, he is no longer autonomous conscience, transparent freedom: he is engaged in the world, he is perishable. (qtd. in Rosso 101)

Maupassant also maintained this conventional duality of logic/instinct in some of his early stories, but he has destroyed this duality in his later stories. For example in his ―Useless Beauty‖, the heroine is given her individuality and subjectivity and she is shown as logical enough to solve her problems. Hence, she claims her subjectivity as opposite to the conventional association of woman with body and senses only. Thus, Maupassant shows how she secures her subjectivity, rather than submit herself to senses. This aspect of Maupassant‘s stories can be related to the New Woman or Feminist writings. Maupassant, hence, through many his stories banishes the ―conventional associations of the female with the body and the male with the mind‖ (Murphy 121). He has thus given his female protagonists a choice to choose for themselves, as against the conventional ‗fixed‘ character. 223

Similarly, Manto has been criticized for his depiction of women as purely instinctive, sensual and passive. He has been also criticized for his negative portrayal of women in some of his stories. For example, Shamas ul Rehman Farooqi, Shaista Fakhri, Harveen Sachdeva Mann and various others have pointed out that Manto in ―Open it‖, ―Cold Meat‖, ―Bu‖ etc. has not given any voice to female characters. Moreover, they are presented as weak and passive. Harveen Mann, Professor of English, Loyola University Chicago, argues that in Manto‘s Partition stories women characters have not been given any subjectivity; rather, they are presented as mere symbols and signifiers of Partition. However, it does not diminish the significance of his other stories in which his female characters enjoy the status of a queen. She has a choice to decide how she will live, and her resilience against suppression and exploitation is more powerful than even the female characters of Manto‘s contemporary female writers.

Thus, this study endeavours to read their short stories from a feminist point of view, and open up all the possible ways to get close to understand the ―unknowability‖ of woman. As both Maupassant and Manto are commonly known as realists, they have a kind of paradoxical relation with woman. As noted by Naomi Schor, ―realism is that paradoxical movement in Western literature when representation can neither accommodate the Otherness of woman nor exist without it‖ (xi). Therefore, both Maupassant and Manto‘s female characterization is not mono- dimensional. They have portrayed woman and her sexuality in a complex manner. Both writers have emphasized on the mental process within sexuality.

5. Masculinity Crisis and Female Sexuality through the Male Gaze

Taking into consideration the contextual background of both the authors, I make an attempt to find out similarities and contrasts, and to draw parallels and comparisons in their writings. On the one hand, Maupassant, being a part of French literary tradition, viewed the female sexuality and more specifically prostitution from aesthetical point of view. On the other hand, for Manto the sociological purpose was more important than aesthetic. Though he does not totally forsake the artistic depiction of an aesthetic object, yet his aim to highlight the social evils was stronger than to purely write a piece of art. Art, to him, was only a medium to achieve that goal. However, one thing was common in both: they have, in their various stories, for example in Manto‘s ―Dhuan‖ (Smoke) or in Maupassant‘s ―The Mustache‖, ―evoked 224 a precognitive, purely experiential mode of male being-in-the-world‖ (Gopal 91). This was the exploration of masculinity. Maupassant and Manto depicted it in different ways. In Maupassant‘s stories, it was the result of the period he lived in, that is the gender chaos in fin de siècle. But Manto‘s experience was different, though the awakening of new brave woman movements was emerging in India too; however, his exploration of masculinity was not against them. Further, it was not restricted to prostitution only, but he has presented it in the context of the Partition also - how male violation of female becomes the expression of masculinity during the period. Moreover, he also describes how the counter female gaze bereft masculinity of the traditional male authority and power. The recognition of ‗Self‘ through the ‗Other‘ is also challenged in many of his stories.

In defining female sexuality and asserting the ‗self‘, the destructive male point-of-view is important. It is commonly known as the ‗male gaze‘. As a matter of fact, male gaze has always been successful in depicting women as sexual and carnal creatures. The female characters in short stories of both the writers are presented through the male narrator. He tends to present them according to the way he chooses. Thus the portrait of woman is created through the male point-of-view and in male fantasy colours. In other words, the male gaze is the only lens through which female characters are seen and presented. According to Beauvoir, women have not described men in such a way because there are no women to proclaim this truth (244). To Beauvoir, even if female sexuality is natural as of man, but still it was moulded and constructed through male gaze. In other words, male gaze often objectifies female character represented by it. The female body became a site of male gaze, their masculine desire and fantasies are inscribed on it. Sometimes, due to conflicting opinions and interests, women were positioned as ideally sexless; however, they also were treated as sexually voracious if they were working-class women. This double- standard sexuality was highly prevalent during the nineteenth-century, and an analysis of the literature of the period would further illustrate the masculine point of view and how it created differences between male and female sexuality. Furthermore, as Ann Heilmann points out:

An activity whose phallic symbolism was well established by the end of the nineteenth century when […] dominant images and metaphors in culture and art represented women as boxes (‗cases‘/case studies), 225

whose mystery could only be lifted if they were opened and penetrated, with the writer‘s pen, […], or the psychoanalyst‘s gaze. (70)

Thus male gaze is a violation of the female sexuality and female mind. It is also a dominant force over the desired object. The desire of male gaze defines female body in terms of binaries and negatives. Consequently, by defining the female body it defines ‗woman‘.

Maupassant, through his stories, unveils the inherent hypocrisy of society. He uncovers the double standard in views on sexuality while depicting the woman or husband-wife relation. For example, his ―An Bord du Lit‖ (1883) (In the Bedroom) presents a frank conversation between husband and wife about adultery. Years later it was further delineated in his novel Notre Coeur with its deep analysis of different vicissitudes of the relationship. In its conclusion, the hypocrisy of man is highlighted especially when it comes to a woman‘s virtue because man can never hold any kind of wickedness no matter how evil he himself may be, for his own virtue or morality is never judged.

Therefore, not only in his short-stories but also in his other works, Maupassant has challenged the double standards prevalent in the male-dominated society regarding sexuality. The most characteristic feature of his writing is that it is bawdy but never coarse, sometimes very light-hearted, yet contains sensitive reflections on the matters like sexuality, female suppression and victimization. Georges Belle in his preface to Contes Grivois, a recently edited collection of the short stories by Maupassant based on the theme of sex, has noted: ―Fallen and saved women indiscriminately populate [his short stories]. Not to mention that the most perverse, less honorable women are those who are accused by the intolerance and hypocrisy of the time‖ (ix).

However, another aspect of misogyny is dominant in Maupassant‘s ―L‘Inconnue‖ (The Unknown), in which a man is fascinated by a woman he saw on the street. She was totally unknown to him until they finally spoke and agreed to make love. After noticing the big black mark on her back, the man could not make love to her. The main character Roger expresses his attempt to ―guess what she was‖ (229). Thus, he rendered her as a mysterious being, a thing he failed to experiment with. He concluded that she is ―one of those dangerous, treacherous beings whose mission it is 226 to drag men to unknown abysses‖ (Maupassant 230), without accepting who she actually was.

According to Emmanuel Grandadam (University of Rouen), the male narrators in Maupassant‘s stories complacently indulge in fantasies which prevent them from seeing women in their alterité, their otherness (189). Maupassant rather wanted to foreground the fact that male characters attempt to deny the otherness of women but they fail to do so. Therefore, like Emile Zola, he could not help to depict woman as ‗other‘. Further, according to Anne Richter, Maupassant tends to reinforce the image of the other as a fascinating and threatening figure, in a femininity that is at once tempting and vile, alienating, and identified with evil and death (20-1). Thus, in this way, she is shown as dark and evil who traps man and who is helpless against her manipulations. Rebecca Stott also observes that women are portrayed as ―a powerful and threatening figure, bearing a sexuality that is perceived to be rapacious or fatal to her male partners‖ (viii). Though degenerative and destructive, she has emerged as a powerful figure in Maupassant‘s stories. Her powerful figure destroys the traditional binaries such as man/woman, powerful/weak, active/passive etc. These binaries are male-centric, who at the centre is powerful, dominant and active; whereas, woman is weak, submissive and marginal. However, the strength and virility of man have been challenged by the creation of such female characters that destroy the traditional authoritarian male figure. They become threat to masculinity, which is one of the core aspects of Maupassant and Manto‘s short stories

―Khushiya‖, the pivotal story for understanding the masculinity crisis and the deconstruction of the male gaze, is a unique attempt of Manto in the history of Urdu literature. In the context of the theme of prostitution, it is different from his other stories. In this story, Manto has deconstructed the male gaze, by which a male defines himself and the ‗other‘. It is rendered neutral and powerless simply by one brave action of a woman when she refuses to recognize and accept it. This stories, rather than dealing with female sexuality, show the crisis of male sexuality. The masculinity crisis explicitly presented in this story further hints towards Manto‘s concern about sexuality and it was not limited to the female sexuality only.

Khushiya, the central character of the story, standing on a car repairing platform which according to Priyamvada Gopal is itself a masculinized activity as car repairing is the activity usually assigned as man‘s job (91), is brooding about the 227 incident of his encounter with his prostitute client, Kanta. His encounter with her is the crux of the story. He is thinking about paraphernalia of modern masculinity, commerce and technology. His identity as an agent of sexual transaction (pimp) comes into conflict with himself as a man. Khushiya, the protagonist of this story, is recognized as a mere pimp by Kanta. He is bereft of the manliness and his identity as a man is bruised. He is insulted by Kanta‘s remark that he is ‗only Khushiya‘. However, this insult is not much different from the insult of Sugandi in ―Hatak‖. Here, it is an attack on Khushiya‘s masculinity; whereas, in ―Hatak‖, it is on Sugandi‘s existence.

Since he had a deep understanding of gender inequality, Manto knew what it meant to be recognized by someone as ‗Other‘. In all the other prostitute stories, woman is recognized as ‗only‘ prostitute, and therefore, the aspect of woman inside prostitute wants to be recognized as a woman and a human being. Similarly, the same thing happens with Khushiya. He could not bear when he was recognized as ‗only Khushiya‘ (a mere pimp). He is bereft of his manliness when his client Kanta opens the door of her room and stands before him almost naked. Her nakedness proves very strong and deconstructs Khushiya‘s masculine gaze. He, the one who makes the private as public (commercializing sex in public), is deconstructed by his own activity. When Kanta says ―what is the harm…It‘s only Khushia…‖ (Manto 60) to Khushiya as a reply to his suggestion that she should not have come out naked, the boundary between public and private is destroyed. It kills him metaphorically like Isher Singh in ―Cold Meat‖. He is trapped in the ambiguity of gender and sexuality. More than the words, it is her smile with which she spoke her words that mentally disturbed Khushiya. He had never seen this kind of smile before. Her smile tears his identity as a male and renders him ‗only Khushiya‘. Therefore, Khushiya‘s masculinity is questioned, and this changes his whole point of view about himself and others. Had she thought of him as a man, she would not have appeared ―unceremoniously naked,‖ he thinks, ―she was a prostitute, of course, but even they didn‘t behave like this‖ (Manto 59; qtd. in Gopal 89)

Before the encounter with Kanta, he would think of her by feminizing and objectifying her as: ―She would be in bed with her hair fixed in curlers, or cleaning her armpits with that depilatory powder, the smell of which almost turned Khushiya‘s stomach‖ (Manto 60). Instead of what he was thinking, the encounter with Kanta 228 stripped his own masculinity. The nonchalance of Kanta brings Khushia to an ―interpretation…so evident and yet so obscure that he could come to no conclusion‖ (Manto 58). He fell into a deep abyss of confusion of gender and was rendered into nothing by a single female counter-gaze. His male gaze is trapped without any recognition and is rendered neutral by Kanta‘s refusal to accept his gaze. He thinks:

Damn it, there was a man standing before her…a full-grown man, whose eyes could penetrate even the clothes of a woman…But, no, she hadn‘t turned a hair. And her eyes? They seemed to have come fresh from the laundry, without a speck of shame or modesty in them. She ought to have felt a little disturbed; a light blush ought to have tinted her eyes. (Manto 59; qtd. in Gopal 92)

Manto, deeply aware of human sexuality, has depicted how Kanta‘s naked appearance rendered him naked. Manto has described it explicitly in phallic terms: ―Khushiya felt as if a peeled banana had slipped out of his hand and stood before him in the shape of Kanta. No, he felt as if he himself has become naked‖ (60, my italics). Thus the male gaze, meant to recognize the power of man, is returned to the gazer and makes him experience the agony that the object of his gaze would feel. He himself thus becomes the object of his gaze.

Further in this story, Khushiya‘s move from a pimp to a customer made him realize what the objectification could do to one‘s self. Therefore, ―Khushiya‖, an emblematic story, is an anecdotal and ruminative character-driven sketch that gives rise to an unexpected and suspenseful climax. It tells us how repressed feelings, especially of desire and culpability, can drive individuals to viciousness. Thus, Manto has presented both the crises of masculinity and female exploitation and suppression, and the continuous struggle of power and resistance in his short stories.

The subject of male sexuality has further received Manto‘s attention in stories such as ―Smoke‖ and ―Blouse‖. In these stories, Manto self-consciously naturalizes masculinity by depicting a young boy‘s sexual awakening and a young man‘s yearning for his ‗earthy‘ tribal lover respectively. By using a lot of imagery and symbols, the author deviates from the postulation of his other stories, where sexuality was defined in terms of power, recognition and suppression, by stressing on pleasure and innocence. Here, maintains Priyamvada Gopal, ―sexuality is the thing-in-itself 229 rather than the means through which social criticism is affected‖ (93). These stories are in contrast to his other stories on female sexuality, particularly of prostitutes, where female exploitation and subjugation is at climax, and where sex is means and part of power and dominance. ―Smoke‖ is placed in a natural phenomenon, where rain, grass, trees, clay etc., act as symbols rather than as mechanical things. Similarly, ―Blouse‖ also depicts the ‗innocent‘ sexual development in a young boy. A scene of a butcher carrying a huge basket of meat of freshly slaughtered goat with smoke arising from it, becomes a sight of sexual arousal for him. The smoke reminds him of the steam coming from the mouths of people in wintery days. Later in the day, Masud‘s sexual feelings are awakened by the smell of the food that his mother is cooking. Also, by massaging his sister‘s aching back by treading on it, his innocent feelings go beyond his understanding. He again thinks of the goat‘s meat.

Kulsum‘s hips were filled with flesh. When Masud‘s feet touched that part, he began to feel as though he were pressing that goat‘s flesh, the one which he had pressed with his fingers at the butcher‘s stall. For a few seconds, this sensation brought the kind of thoughts into his mind and body that seemed to have neither head nor tail. He didn‘t understand their meaning, and how could he, when no thought was complete? (Manto 74; qtd. in Gopal 94)

The protagonist like the small girl protagonist in Ismat‘s ―The Quilt‖ is innocent and too little to understand the real meaning of the feeling that he is experiencing. According to Priyamvada Gopal, he ―cannot place his experience within a cognitive framework; once again, the interpretive burden is upon the reader‖ (Gopal 94-95). However, while massaging his sister Kulsum‘s soft moaning adds to his mysterious feelings and he starts to compare her with goats flesh. But it makes him feel guilty of his unholy thoughts: ―Once or twice he wondered: if Kulsum were slaughtered and skinned, would smoke arise from her flesh too? But he felt himself a sinner at such unholy thoughts and wiped them away from his mind just as he would take a sponge to a slate‖ (Manto 75; qtd. in Gopal 75)

In one of his essays ―The Pleasures of the Senses,‖ Manto differentiates between what he calls as the physical and the erotic, where the former is natural and the latter is socially constructed. He says his stories do not have any erotic feeling. For example, Masud‘s feelings are precognitive and ontological, ‗unnamed pleasure‘; 230 while erotic is always ideological and associated with a specific kind of knowledge (WIR 80). Further, he says that ―I have offered no moral in this story; I have given no speeches on morality because I don‘t consider myself a so-called reformer or a philosopher of character‖ (80).

Apart from ―Blouse‖ or ―Khushiya‖ the crisis of masculinity is also found in ―Black Shalwar‖ which also narrates a story of a prostitute. Priyamvada Gopal is of the view that the real prostitute in the story turns out to be Shankar, not Sultana. She says that it is masculinity which is shown to be debased. It is presented as deprived of the mythical status of power and control, and ―reduced to a mere contractual commercial exchange‖ (Gopal 98). Thus the aspect which was hidden is uncovered, that is the gender identities and the logic of commerce. Black Shalwar is a symbol of many things such as gender, social inclusion, religion and the commerce of sex.

Manto turns out to be a real psychologist in his stories dealing with the identity crises. In ―Khushiya‖, he reveals how important it is for a male to be recognized by a female. When Khushiya is ignored as ‗only Khushia,‘ a pimp, not a man, his very existence is shaken by Kanta‘s counter gaze, which breaks his own male gaze into pieces. Similarly, in ―Hatak‖, Sogandhi knew that she is a good person, but she needs someone to acknowledge it, someone to validate it.

Thus Manto has deeply understood the psychology of human sexuality. He has shown how sexuality itself needs the other‘s recognition, and the crisis of identity is somewhat deeply associated with one‘s sexual identity and other‘s recognition of it. All the physical and psychological nuances related to sex and sexuality have been discussed by Manto in these stories.

Manto‘s famous partition story ―Thanda Gosht‖ (Cold Meat) also deals with male sexuality and masculinity crises. The moment of cognition and self-realization helps Isher Singh, the main character of the story, to transform from a brutal rapist and murderer to a mere passive victim of both physical and psychological violence. Published in 1949, this story caught the attention of many social and religious activists who filed a court case against the obscenity that they observed in the story. This story is very important for understanding Manto‘s own evolving literary politics, and the politics of gender and sexuality which created the cultural identities during the Partition and the ensuing violence. Mary Donaldson-Evans gives another possible 231 interpretation by pointing out certain gender breakdown whereby Maupassant‘s female characters for example Allouma in ―Allouma‖ has been given some masculine attributes and symbolic power to blur the sense of masculine and feminine. Manto also does the same thing in his ―Cold Meat‖, describing the character of Kulwant Kaur in masculine attributes, and her final move of killing Isher Singh significantly proves it. Therefore a comparison between the two authors can be made while developing this point further.

Apart from the physical and psychological violence that the story ―Cold Meat‖ talks about, ‗the sexual fluidity‘ also becomes Manto‘s concern in it. The story depicts the sexual encounter between two lovers. Their relationship, which is heterosexual and male-dominated, is completely very powerfully reversed. At the end of the story, we see that the male dominance is unravelled and turned into female dominance as Kulwant Kaur is described as highly womanly (Masculine) who dominates man. Here, it reminds of the Mary Donaldson-Evans‘ another possible interpretation of Maupassant‘s description of the eponym character in ―Alloma‖. In her A Woman’s Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant’s Fiction, she has interpreted the masculine description of Alluma in the story as a certain gender breakdown and symbolic power of blurring gender divisions. Manto has also described Kulwant Kaur with some masculine attributes, whereby, especially her final move of killing her lover significantly proves the blurring of the sense of masculine and feminine. Therefore, the similarity between the two characters becomes obvious as far as this aspect is concerned.

Apart from the partition narrative, ―Cold Meant‖ can be read as a story of identity and masculinity threat. Isher Singh‘s maleness is rendered as weak and he is easily stabbed by Kulwant Kaur. In the first half of the story, he plays the role of a tyrant-male who looted, killed and raped; but, in the latter half, he becomes weak, neutral, and impotent. Therefore, besides presenting women as victim, this story also rejected the ideal narrative by rendering Isher (strong sexual being) himself as weak and victim. After being stabbed by his lover, Isher Singh becomes a symbol of powerlessness. Moreover, his being rendered as impotent by a dead woman also shows how the patriarchal image of powerful man is shaken and destroyed. 232

Kulwant Kaur very aggressively asks him to name ―the slut…who has sucked you dry‖. Ishar‘s answer to her, ‗no one‘, is ironically true, as the victim does not have any identity or even a name. The violent act, rape, in the name of religion and nation has rendered the victim‘s identity as ‗no one‘ (Gopal 103). But the identity of heterosexual Ishar Singh, which was defined by his heat, is reduced to nothing but coldness. Thus, the reversal of identities and changing of roles focus on the fluidity of identities. Manto himself points out that sexuality is the main concern of this story, not to eroticise the text, he argues, but to contrast between life and death. ―If Isher Singh himself had been a cold man then the effect of this incident related to a forced sexual act would not have been so strong‖ (Manto 114; qtd. in Gopal 104).

The contradiction of the acknowledgement of gaze and its rejection is present in ―Cold Meat‖ much alike in the short story ―Khushiya‖. Gopal explains how the Isher Singh becomes a victim of his own male gaze like Khushiya. The passive corpse victim disallows his gaze which thus returns to him. It reveals to him ‗the fragility of his power and subject position‘. In the words of Priyamvada Gopal:

Ishvar [Isher] Singh‘s own masculinity is denaturalized and destabilized by the death of the gendered other who cannot perform the cognitive act of acknowledging Isvar‘s [Isher‘s] power and difference. By dying, by literally becoming ‗not woman‘ and ‗not human‘, the potential rape victim disallows the enactment of gendered power relations, and so the burden of cognition becomes Isvar‘s [Isher‘s] own. As with Khushia, whose gaze returns to himself and his own destabilized masculinity, the scrutiny at the end of this violent encounter returns to Isvar [Isher] Singh‖ (105, my parenthesis)

He knew himself as a powerful male, but his knowledge required acknowledgement from the gendered other, and therefore the rejection destabilized his subject position and knowledge of himself. Similarly, Sugandhi in ―Hatak‖ also knew that she is good, but the rejection by Seth changes her whole position. The creation and acknowledgement of other than self is important to stabilize one‘s position in power relations.

Manto deconstructs the central position of man in the story ―Cold Meat‖. He annihilates the centred self and reconstructs the whole apparatus of masculinity. 233

According to him, this reconstruction was necessary to understand the binary oppositions created by society. The reformation and reconstruction in Isher Singh from inhuman to human and from violator to violated is understood by the end of the story, the moment ―where he comes to a realization, or let‘s say, becomes capable of realizing that the dagger which just slit my throat is one that I used to kill six people‖ (Manto 130; qtd. in Gopal 105). Thus, transformation occurs at two levels: literary by becoming the victim of his own dagger and metaphorically by becoming the victim of his own sexual violence on the dead girl. His violence returned to him both physically and psychologically. He becomes the victim of his own masculinity. However, Manto believes that Isher‘s death gave birth to a new human being who has a moral understanding and depth of insight of violence after becoming a victim himself. Therefore, the story deals with the individual and collective cognitive understanding of the moral process, which leads to a psychic transformation and social reconstruction.

Manto, being a realist, has exposed a psychological reality. Accordingly, the story of Isher Singh reflects the character‘s mental state. The author has not used his own language but Isher‘s language, which is vulgar, to depict Isher Singh who was an unrefined man. How could he use sophisticated language for an unrefined man? In his ―Zahmat-e-Mehr-e-Darakhshan‖, Manto‘s this idea in his response to the trials on his ―Cold Meat‖ in the following words:

The question is why not present things just as they are? Why make jute into silk? Why make a heap of garbage into a heap of perfume? Will turning our faces from reality help us become better people? Absolutely not—so why take umbrage at the character of Isher Sing and his way of talking? (Manto 115; qtd. in Gopal 108)

Isher Sing is a crude person, so is his language, which becomes effective in highlighting humanity in every shade. Manto wrote, ―I am sorry that a piece of writing telling human beings that they are not separate from humanity even when they become animal-like should be considered obscene and sexually suggestive‖ (Jala TPP 157). Manto has a strong belief in humanity that he does not even exclude Isher Singh from it. Manto argues that : 234

Do we not see a glimpse of the humanity in Isher Singh‘s dark heart which causes him to negate his own desires - and it is a healthy thing that the writer of the story has not lost faith in human beings and humanity. If the writer had not made sensuousness integral to Isher Singh‘s way of feeling and thinking, then truly ‗Cold Meat‘ would be a very base thing. (Manto 115; qtd. in Gopal 108)

By presented the masculinity in his stories, Manto thus continued the same project of ‗reformation of male bodies and psyches‘ (Gopal 91) which had been once initiated by Angarey collection, particularly the short stories such as ―Dulari‖ (Darling) by Sajjad Zaheer and ―Jawanmardi‖ (Virility) by Mahmuduzzafar.

Besides a good number of stories on sexuality and woman‘s issues, Manto has also written a number of essays. For example, in one of his essays entitled ―The Story Writer and the Matter of Sex‖ he discusses the contradiction in life, particularly the contradiction of modernity which mostly involves the sex. Now, woman has also become a contradiction. According to Manto, ―Woman is both near and far…sometimes appearing naked, sometimes clothed‖ (Manto 352; qtd. in Gopal 108). He further says, ―Two lands can be separated from each other by a law but no administration, no decree, no law can keep man and woman apart from each other‘ (Manto 352).

―Shaheed Jinis‖ (Martyr of Sexuality) is often attributed to Manto. His treatment of sex is different from other writers, both Western and Eastern. For example, unlike Lawrence, he has not given sex a status of religion. But Like Maupassant he has considered it as the power of life; this power neither creates pleasure nor vileness or loathsomeness. However, this helps him present the reality of life, and that is why he mostly expresses sex through the prostitutes who are not like Mirza Hadi Ruswa‘s ―Umrao Jan Ada‖ and Qazi Abdul Gafar‘s ―Lilla‖ but like the prostitute of ―Ball of Fat‖ by Maupassant. Mamtaz Shireen was also of the view that Manto‘s prostitute character resembles with Maupassant‘s female character in that she is often presented as a low-life prostitute, who does not have wealth and fame, but she has a big heart like Ball of Fate who protected the honor of the daughters of good families by surrendering herself to enemy forces.

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6. Representing Woman in Prostitution, Partition, and Home

In her influential book Manto: Nuri Nah Nari, Mumtaz Shireen analyses Manto‘s treatment of woman and her sexuality, the core and favourite subject of his stories. Shireen asserts that she wrote her book not because Manto has shown a lot of sympathy towards female characters, but because of the equal status he has given to both men and women in his stories. He not only sympathizes with women characters, but he equally loves Isher Singh, Babu Gopinath and Sham. Further, in his stories, women play different roles, and Manto like a psychologist minutely observes and studies these roles. The role of a wife, prostitute, daughter and most of all mother that of woman is thus the embodiment of motivation, innocence, loftiness, chastity and motherhood. Shireen has summed up Manto‘s portrayal of woman thus:

Woman herself is the embodiment of motivation. The progress or regress of every society depends upon her high moral stature or weakness. But I consider the facet of mother in a woman as the noblest and chaste, and Manto too has presented a woman‘s role as mother very beautifully in his stories. In fact, both mother and prostitute live in a woman. Psychologists have analysed woman but who else but Manto has most expressively presented this reality in our literature. (Shireen 27, Self trans.)

Without hiding reality Manto has created a world which is a mixture of good and evil. This world of his stories is full of struggle and tribulation. When he talks about a woman he does not forget to mention her sexuality. Similarly, when he talks about man he does not ignore patriarchy and its oppression. According to Mumtaz Shireen, it is only because of this that he is a conscientious artist. She points out that:

Manto‘s writings are the cleanest and neatest among all writers who have written on sexuality. His explicit, open and direct articulation does not excite like Ismat Chugtai‘s titillating sexuality hidden behind curtains. In spite of sex being the subject, there are few elements of sexual pleasure and excitement [in his stories]... Manto was not an obscene writer. (Shireen 38, Self trans.)

Woman is not a source of evil, but an embodiment of innocence. She is the victim of society in which she has become a helpless creature. To Manto, she is the 236 daughter of nature, living a life of simplicity and innocence. ‗Hawa‘, a character by Manto, whom he calls the ―Daughter of Nature‖ and Mumtaz Shireen says that in this character we can see how an innocent girl becomes a victim of man. ―Manto too accepts the woman‘s necessity and man‘s exploitation. It is the man, according to Manto, who is responsible for scandalizing the womanhood of this young girl and for destroying her life‖ (Shireen 65, Self trans.).

On the other hand, Maupassant would like those characters that are the amalgamation of different natures like Manto‘s Hawa, Begu, Ghatan etc. For example, in his preface to Abbé Prévost‘s short novel History of Manon Lescaut and of the Chevalier des Grieux, Maupassant praises Abbe Prevost for creating the inimitable character of Manon Lescaut, who is a complex character of different traits and vices as well. She is at once complex, changeable, sincere, hateful and adorable. At the outset, in his preface to Abbe Prevost‘s novel, Maupassant says that women are trying to progress more and more despite for centuries being declared as incapable of any artistic or scientific work. Such attempts are useless because they have only two distinct and charming roles - love and motherhood. According to Maupassant Greeks had established separate spheres for both aspects of women without any confusion. Mother restrained in her home and courtesan as a free spirit of charm and gallantry for playing the role of seduction. Great men of the age lived in the houses of courtesans. They would listen to their advice and were intoxicated in their love. He further counts few names such as Cleopatra, Aspasia, Phryne, Ninon de l'Enclos, Marion Delorme, Madame de Pompadour and Mann Lescaut. Among them, the figure of Manon Lescaut would haunt the souls and always live in the hearts of great men. Her figure in the novel is full of seduction and instinctive perfidy. In all, she is a perfect whole woman and will always be. The character of Manon Lescaut is considered as the perfect woman in literature. She has been created with both innocence and allurement. This amalgamation of allurement, innocence and weakness has made her the perfect ‗woman‘. Manto‘s ‗Begu‘ and ‗Gatan woman‘ too have many similarities with Manon; for instance, they all are close to nature. Therefore, Maupassant in the preface expresses his thoughts about the female characterization, which, according to him, should be an amalgamation of all aspects and colours of humanity. In the same vein, the allurement and attraction in Maupassant‘s female characters is close to Manon Lescaut as the sensual appeal is in their eyes. 237

Similarly, Manto‘s Rukma, Halak, and Kulwant Kaur also belong to the same category as they are sexually strong and alluring, but they have the mysterious complexity of sadism and masochism. At this point, one could doubt Manto‘s sympathy for female characters, but being ‗connatural‘ human beings, they are the amalgamation of both evil and good. However, in presenting a realistic picture of life, Manto has presented most of his prostitutes very sympathetically and compassionately. He has rather criticized man for exploiting them both economically and sexually. For example, Manto‘s has taunted Raj Kishore and Madhu Hawaldar harshly because both exploited Neelam and Sugandhi respectively. He hates men who mistreat women. The imbalanced man-woman relationship in his stories is the result of his realistic study of human society, which is fundamentally based on the patriarchal power structure. Of this patriarchal power structure, prostitution is one of the institutions which regulate the dominance of male over female. However, in the short stories of both the writers, it acts as a paradox of both dominance and freedom.

A) Prostitution

Prostitution is an integral aspect of the patriarchal power structure on which both Maupassant and Manto have written a lot of stories. These stories present the miserable life of prostitutes. They are exploited physically, psychologically, emotionally, sexually and even economically. Through prostitution, both the writers show how in the patriarchal society, lower-class women are marginalized and exploited by men for satiating their lust.

Applying another perspective of feminism to prostitution, it simultaneously creates a stance to break the conventional boundaries of set structures for woman in patriarchal society. A large number of feminists have written on prostitution as a very complex power structure of dominance and male privilege. As noted by Kesler, in her article ‗Is a Feminist Stance in Support of Prostitution Possible? An Exploration of Current Trends‘, it is ―the absolute embodiment of patriarchal male privilege‖ (19) and it represents very graphically the male domination and defines the sexuality of woman at large. Prostitution, as far as the present study is concerned, has been seen as a phenomenon providing both subject position and ‗body-objectification‘ of female sexuality. Thus it is a very crucial knot full of various contradictions and problems which covers the whole history of female subordination and exploitation. Further, as Donna Guy illustrates: 238

Full of apparent contradictions and discrepancies, the history of modern prostitution control offers a dynamic perspective on the private lives of women as well as the public functioning of medicine, patriarchy and the nation state and emphasizes the need to understand how gender and sexuality are interrelated inextricably to race, cultural diversity and economic circumstances. (Guy 182)

Maupassant and Manto were very brave and courageous writers who wrote on the subject, prostitution, which is, to use the words of Carole Pateman, a feminist and political theorist, ―morally undesirable . . . because it is one of those most graphic examples of men‘s domination over women‖ (TSC 56). Further, during the nineteenth century, both male and female French writers have presented prostitutes as if they were the ―great social evil‖ because it was believed that they had spread some contagious diseases. Being the centre of attention for everyone, they caught the attention of the greatest fiction writers of the period as well.

The issue being debated was whether society should tolerate prostitution as an inevitable phenomenon that should be regulated in the public interest – the public health position – or suppressed as an intolerable evil – the moral purity position. (Fisher xii-xiii)

However, one thing is obvious that prostitutes directly and very clearly signify the real situation of woman in society in terms of their being commercialized as sexual tools. According to Evelina Giobbe, ―she [prostitute] is paradigmatic of women‘s social, sexual and economic subordination, in that her status is the basic unit by which all women‘s value is measured and to which all women can be reduced‖ (qtd. in Mackinnon, ―Prostitution and Civil Rights‖ 29). Laurie Shrage, Professor of Philosophy, Florida International University, also observes that ―prostitution... is a cultural institution that is produced by, and reproduces, repressive norms of female sexuality‖ (Shrage134). Further, the writings of the Radical feminists such as Kate Millet, Kathleen Barry, Carole Pateman, Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, to name a few, are worth mentioning. Almost all of them have concluded that prostitution has done most severe harm to the woman‘s sexuality and identity. They have understood it as violence against women not only in the matter of a physical act, but the concept of ―buying sex‖ itself describes the system of male power, privileging always the male sex. Prostitution has reduced the identity of women to sexual objects 239 which men can buy, sell and throw away. Thus ‗sexual slavery‘, a term first coined by Kathleen Barry in her seminal book The Prostitution of Sexuality, is the root cause of women‘s oppression. The Idea of Prostitution by Shelia Jeffries is a groundbreaking work in this regard. As a critique of prostitution, the book focuses on the constructed sexuality of woman which is illustrated by the author as:

[Prostitution is] male sexual behaviour characterised by three elements variously combined: barter, promiscuity, and emotional indifference. Any man is a prostitution abuser who, for the purposes of his sexual satisfaction, habitually or intermittently reduces another human being into a sexual object by the use of money or other mercenary considerations. (Jeffries 4)

According to the famous maxim of Mackinnon, in her ―Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory‖, ―Sexuality is to feminism, what work is to Marxism; that which is most one‘s own and yet that which is most taken away‖ (515). Thus a kind of syllogism is created whereby the first premise is that prostitute is defined only by her bodily-act and the second premise is that woman is reduced to prostitute. Woman‘s identity, therefore, is defined by the bodily sexual act, which clearly portrays her as a subordinate being in every respect. Therefore, prostitution is created by man (patriarchal society) to subordinate woman.

As already mentioned, both Maupassant and Manto raised their voices against this form of exploitation. They have given new perspectives in their stories through which they have challenged the dominant social institution. In this way, both the authors have been able to expose deeply the socio-political and ‗transfer point of power‘ institution of prostitution. According to Priyamvada Gopal, Manto has used his art in writing against the grain. He was writing not only against pimps, prostitution and partition, but all the other power controlling bodies and mechanisms prevailing in the society. In the most famous stories of Manto on prostitution such as ―Babu Gopinath‖, ―Sharda‖, ―Mummy‖, ―Kali Shalwar‖, ―Hatak‖, ―Hundred Candle Power Bulb‖ etc., prostitute characters play the central role and ―the female body comes to represent social stratification and exploitation‖ (96), to quote Priyamvada Gopal. He had a strong hatred against the fixity of the society. He was against the society which creates prostitution to create prostitutes on the one hand, but rejects their identity and existence as human beings on the other hand. But the conclusions that Manto has 240 drawn are that prostitutes as human beings are not fixed, rather they evolve and possess humanity like any other member of the society.

Unlike his other stories in which he has not explicitly criticized society rather he tried to define sex as a natural phenomenon, these stories criticized the constructed reality harshly. Moreover, these stories are laden with symbols and metaphors of submission and suppression. For example, Manto has deliberately used the overwrought metaphor of ‗corpse‘ for ‗prostitute‘. He says:

The house of the prostitute is a bier which society carries on its shoulders. Until it is buried, it will remain a topic of discussion. This corpse is rotten, yes; foul-smelling, yes; disgusting, yes; frightening, yes; abhorrent, yes, but what‘s the harm in looking at it? Does she mean nothing to us? Are we not her loved ones? Every now and then, I will open the coffin to look at her face and show it to others.

She must be spoken for. (Manto 43–4 ―Safed Joot‖)

Manto has not only spoken or written for her, but he was so close to her that he would go through her wounded body into her heart, and ‗for a while, become this wretched creature‘ (Manto, Khuliyat 352). Like Keats who would imagine himself being part of the bird on his window and would search food between little stones, Manto would become the prostitute when he would write about her. According to Nigar Azim, whether Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi would become a woman or not, Manto would become one while writing. Had he not become one, characters like Mummy, Sharida, Mozil etc. would not have been created (Azim 44). Therefore, nothing was hidden from him. Whether it is Sugandhi‘s yearning for love and respect, or Sultana‘s longing for money and home, Manto knew the basic reality of their situation they were living in.

In ―Hatak‖ (Insult), Manto has validated Sugandhi‘s nature and her being a good person. It highlights the exploitations by systematic social institutions, and shows prostitution as a commercial exchange. Catherine Mackinnon in her article ―Prostitution and Civil Rights‖ considers this exchange as the epitome of oppression of sexual relations, and ―the public recognition of men‘s mastery‖ (Mackinnon 13). Further, most of the radical feminists are of the view that it is the public appearance and recognition of what is done within domestic walls. Here the relation, bereft of any 241 emotions, is just a matter of payment and satiation of desire. The moment Sugandhi gets hurt by her rejection in a commercial exchange with Seth, both exploitation and commercial exchange are brought together in the story. Seth‘s torch becomes metaphor of patriarchy. According to Priyamvada Gopal, she is dragged from her privacy (room) to public (street) only to be slapped on her face by the glare of the flashlight (Gopal 99). She rebels against her insult by breaking all her ideal pictures hanging on her wall. She also retaliates by kicking off her lover, Madho, from her room. Thus it clearly points out her self-awakening, but it also leaves some ambiguity when she says, ―I am and whatever is hidden inside me, neither you nor your father can ever buy‖ (Manto 98). She has been exchanging her body for money from the first day when she was brought there. The rejection by Seth in a deal made her feel that she has gained nothing. Her life, like a sieve, has stored nothing but she has diluted out the difference between the powerful and the weak.

Similarly, Manto‘s ―License‖ highlights the powerful institutions in our society. It is surprising that a woman is not allowed to have a license for driving a Tonga, but she is easily given a license for selling her body. This dualistic attitude of society became one of the major themes of Manto‘s stories.

Daniela Bredi in her article ―Fallen Women: A Comparison of Rusva and Manto‖ analyses the depiction of ‗fallen women‘ by both authors, focusing on women belonging to the third class and mostly prostitutes. She says: ―In particular when he [Manto] speaks of women and prostitutes, he demonstrates that he is capable of profound psychological insight, creating real people and not pretexts for reformist sermons‖ (120). In fact, these fallen women, the heroines of Manto‘s stories, are those women who have been subjected to marginalization, victimization, desperation, oppression and violation. For example, the heroine of his story ―A Hundred Candle Power Bulb‖ is very pathetic, whose pimp prevents her even from sleeping, spurring her to a final rebellion. ―The common harlot drawn by Manto, far from being mistress of herself, is incapable of managing herself; she lets men exploit her without being able to find a way out of her dependence, except by extreme measures which signal her degradation‖ (Bredi 121). Daniela Bredi further discusses totally marginalized space of a prostitute. In the context of Manto‘s short stories, she adds:

There is no fascination, there is no magic in the situation of the common harlot, there is no culture, there is no worldliness, there is no 242

consciousness of living an alternate life to that of a respectable woman, there is no pride for one‘s own accomplishments and for one‘s own independence. There is only a painful resignation, liable at times to open up into gestures of protest, sometimes extreme - breaking open a pimp‘s head with a brick, as in ―Sau Kaindal Pavar ka Balb‖; sleeping with one‘s arms around a mangy dog, as in ―Hatak‖ - sometimes submissive - the last kindness of a woman in love, as in ―Sharda‖ - but which mainly transform themselves into the most complete apathy - the non-life of Sultana in ―Kali Shalvar.‖ Manto‘s world is very far from Rusva‘s, and not only because time has passed: society has changed, sensibilities have changed. (125)

According to Manto, our society has treated women very cruelly, especially those who are marginalized. They fill their stomach by selling their body. For him, both man and women are equal in every respect and to categorize them on the basis of sex would be the greatest error; however, our social institutions have been doing it from times immemorial. In this regard, Leslie Flemming says that Manto‘s every story is ―not primarily a psychological study of a red-light district whore; it is rather a profound indictment of the position into which Indian society has placed all women‖ (Flemming 54).

These prostitutes always wish for a life against which nobody will raise a finger - a life in which they will be treated like humans, having equality in every respect. Sugandhi would always fill her empty world with her imagination. Because she had nothing else that the society had given her except exploitation and deception. Sultana‘s train has stopped somewhere in the middle of the track. Therefore, the world of Manto‘s short stories is full of people like Sugandhi, Sultana, Sakeena, and many other nameless female characters for whom life has become horrible. His short stories mirror the life of a woman in a patriarchal society.

Thus Manto‘s representation of prostitute characters is very similar to Maupassant‘s prostitute characters in that she is a downtrodden underdog whore who has nothing except her kind heart. She is so kind that she sacrifices herself by selling her body for nothing.

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B) Marriage and Prostitution - the Blurring of Boundaries

Woman‘s only destiny, both sexually and socially, has been to get married. From ages, she has been dependent on man and her relationship with him is her ultimate destiny. Her entire life before her marriage is spent in dreaming of her ideal man. According to Beauvoir, woman always dreams of an ideal man with whom she thinks she is going to spend her life happily. She leaves the house of her parents and submits herself to her husband, but neither of these belongs to her in totality. If her marriage happens to be a failure, she feels she has nowhere to go and this in-between- ness then becomes the most destructive element in her life. Thus, the plot of marriage and the life around it bears much importance in late nineteenth-century French literature about female sexuality. In this context, Holbrook Jackson in his book The Eighteen Nineties notes, ―the popular novel of the past…ended more or less happily with the sound of wedding bells. The new novel very often began there‖ (271).

In the same manner, prostitution becomes the other touchstone for defining female sexuality and her identity. Over the time, the division between marriage and prostitution has vanished in that patriarchy has treated female as the ‗other‘ in both the ‗spaces‘. In this context, Beauvoir says that ―marriage […] has prostitution as its immediate corollary‖ (II, 424). Everywhere, she is considered as a mere thing for sexual gratification and procreation. Both in prostitution and in the bond of marriage, she is treated as the ‗Other‘. In prostitution, she becomes a sex tool, whereas, in homes, she becomes a procreating machine. In patriarchy, she has no other purpose than to satisfy man and obey him submissively. Thus the layer between the two is rendered fragile.

In 1888, just two years after the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, Mona Caird wrote in her essay on ―Marriage‖ that ―we are...led to conclude that ‗modern respectability‘ draws its life-blood from the degradation of womanhood in marriage and in prostitution‖ (79). Similarly, we can find enough examples in the literature of the period where the parallels between the institution of marriage and the figure of the prostitute have been created. In both France and Britain, the need to control female desire and sexuality was often accompanied by a tendency to encase it within either the ―respectable‖ institution of marriage or the ―shameful‖ profession of the prostitute. 244

The female sexuality has been directly linked to her position in society, and her position is either defined by her marriage or her association with prostitution. Women have been segregated and given constructed and reduced ―spaces‖: wife‘s sexuality restricted to a given ―space‖, that is marriage, the home, and if she ventures out into the ―street‖, she is defined as prostitute and prostitution becomes her ―space‖. Similarly, Kathleen Barry notes that ―when sex is not explicitly treated as genuine human interaction, it dehumanizes the experience and thereby dominates women‖ (Barry 28). Therefore, it is the sex which either way dominates woman - whether she is in the home or in prostitution. In this regard, De Beauvoir has made an important point that the sexual act constitutes the livelihood of both the prostitute and the wife; however, what differentiates one from the other is that one has a number of clients while other has only one, and also the frequency, or form, the ―payments‖ take place. Thus, the idea of an economic parallel between the prostitute and the wife constitutes a major difference on the basis of which the society divides woman or defines her.

Maupassant and Manto have written a good number of stories, dealing with the themes of marriage and prostitution. The dichotomies of sexuality and the binaries such as ―Angel in the house/whore‖, ‗legal/illegal‘, master/slave etc. have been illustrated in their various short stories. However, both the sides, whether ‗home‘ or ‗whorehouse‘ and ‗wife‘ or ‗whore‘ come under the same ‗institution‘ and that is ‗man‘ or ‗patriarchy‘. The boundary between what is known as respectable and shameful is blurred in their stories. In both ways, woman is exploited and subjugated in both institutions of marriage and prostitution.

Maupassant‘s ―Au Bord du Lit‖ (In the Bedroom), in a comical undertone like much of his short fiction, very acutely and powerfully depicts a married woman and parallels her with a prostitute. In this story, Maupassant depicts a woman (wife) who wishes to be paid and treated as a prostitute or a kept mistress. Thus, she reverses the demeaning connotations of the exchange of sex for economic and material well-being. By aligning her position as wife with that of the prostitute, she is bringing the public sphere into the private realm of the home. More importantly, she breaks apart the shackles of the expected, confined, sexuality of the wife in order to experience the freer one of the prostitute. As Lynda Nead in Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain notes that it is the combination of cash with the public sphere that allows the prostitute to be powerful and independent (349). 245

Besides prostitute and wife, the role of man as a client and husband is also challenged in their stories. The husband has been shown acting as a client or male prostitute, with only one difference that he pays for sex to his wife. Particularly, in the stories of Maupassant, husbands resemble clients; thus shattering the constructed difference between the two. For example, in his story ―In the Bedroom,‖ Maupassant draws ―an economic parallel between the prostitute and the wife‖ (Rosso 147). Further, three years after the publication of ―In the Bedroom‖ Maupassant revisits ―the theme of prostitution as sexual fantasy in marriage‖ (Rosso 149) in another story ―Imprudence‖. This story is essential to understand the influence of the prostitution on home, specifically the influence of the prostitute on the wife‘s sexuality at fin de siècle in France. Through this story, the author has maintained that like men, woman can also have many partners and thus experience many relations. Generally, prostitutes are presented as the representation of women as far as female sexuality is concerned. Now, because she can have many partners and experience several relationships with many men, she is thus symbolically depicted as the extreme form of female sexuality. Therefore, Maupassant has presented unconventionally the desires of domestic women and blurred the divisions between public and private which have been also discussed by Manto in his story ―Khushiya‖ and in nonfiction essay ―Prostitution‖. Hence, both writers have attempted to point out the symmetrical lines in the situations of prostitute and wife, as has been pointed out by Simone de Beauvoir in this context: ―From an economic point of view, [the prostitute‘s] situation is symmetrical to the married woman‘s...For both, the sexual act is a service; the latter is engaged for life by one man; the former has several clients who pay her per item‖ (qtd. in Rosso 146-47).

Apparently, the role of a wife looks less oppressed and exploited than a prostitute, but when the wife in the story chooses the other, it shows how prostitute is freer. Although, in both cases, woman has to be passive and submissive; however, according to Pateman, the difference between paid sex and loving sex is ―the difference between the reciprocal expression of desire and unilateral subjection to sexual acts with the consolation of payment: it is the difference for women between freedom and subjection‖ (Pateman 204).

By first highlighting the difference between the prostitute and the wife and then shattering the difference, the significance of the Maupassant‘s story lies in the 246 revolutionary initiative of the wife to transcend the muted, hypocritical symmetry between wife and prostitute to her open reclaiming of it.

Therefore in his other stories also, and in many stories of his contemporary writers, this parallelism between the two has been observed. In Le Temps, Le Désir et l’Horreur (Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses), Alain Corbin discusses the influence of the prostitute on the wife‘s sexuality at the turn of the century as:

A change took place, ... slowly blurring the differences between the courtesan and the respectable wife. ‗The alcove became a house of ill repute.‘…Moralists emphasized both the role of the prostitute as a model of hedonistic practices…and her failure to contain the respectable woman within the boundaries of decency. (115)

In this way, Maupassant has presented the prostitute not as a degenerate figure or source of degeneration, but as a model of sexual emancipation for his heroines. His woman characters follow their example, and much importance is given to prostitutes, who according to the society are evil and a source of degeneration. Imitating prostitutes, the wife characters of Maupassant thus emancipate themselves and expand their sexual horizons.

The same kind of observation can be found in Manto‘s stories also. He has given the same kind of importance to the prostitute characters. To him, they can also possess a good soul - an embodiment of great soul and sympathy. As is apparent from his many stories, Manto could see the light in the darkness, and a pure heart in the prostitute who is considered as an evil force in society. Therefore, through this comparison between prostitute and housewife, Manto, like Maupassant, has shattered the conventional notions about women in general and prostitute in particular. Furthermore, the progressive blurring of boundaries also highlights the role of prostitute as an emblem of active sexual desire and subjectivity. Similarly, French naturalists also gave a voice to the prostitute and therefore emphasized that even though a prostitute, the woman inside her is not lost. The woman is very much alive in her, more alive than in a housewife. She is not silenced like a housewife.

Now, ‗motherhood‘ would be the only aspect which would distinguish between the two. In his famous story ―L‘Inutile Beauté‖ (1890) (The Useless Beauty), 247 which deals with the themes of marriage, sexuality and motherhood, Maupassant has situated sexuality and reproduction in connection with the idea of beauty. In this story, the husband is consciously attacking the beauty of his wife by making her pregnant again and again. Here pregnancy symbolizes the male dominance and an attack on woman‘s beauty, body, subjectivity and freedom because it happens against her will and the husband does it out of jealousy. Even being his wife, she is treated as a child producing machine for him. The husband defines her sexuality in terms of childbearing. Her identity is created by her husband based on her reproductive function, or in Foucault‘s the ―serious function of reproduction‖ (3).

In this story, Maupassant has created another complex character of woman. It is also an example of Maupassant‘s invested depictions of woman. Through her words and those of the male observer at the theatre, a complex image of woman is constructed. She does not wish to be confined to an ―existence de jument poulinière‖ (existence of a broodmare) shut away in a stud farm and to the ―travaux forcés de l’engendrement‖ (the forced labour of breeding) (Maupassant 108). She wishes not to be treated as just a mother, because she is more than that. Her existence is of more worth than to repopulate the world, which her husband thinks about her. She says, ―I am, we are, women of the civilized world, sir. We are no longer, and we refuse to be, simple females repopulating the earth‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 471).

At the end of the story, her husband reaches a new understanding of his wife. ―He felt this being was not only a woman destined to perpetuate the race, but a strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires, accumulated during centuries‖ (Maupassant, TCSSM 483). Finally, she is given individuality and Maupassant has succeeded in annihilating the conventional stereotypes regarding the motherhood. Thus, it is this reinterpretation of the role of mother which is simultaneously presented as sexual and sensual.

Manto has also created some complex woman characters that either have no permanent physical relation or they are professional prostitutes, but still, they play the role of perfect wives and mothers. For example, the characters such as Janki, Zeenat, Sharida, Shoba, Burmi Larki and Mummy are the incarnation of simplicity, love, passion, humility and motherhood. A very powerful feeling of a mother is breathing inside them. But their condition and society do not allow them to have the happiness 248 of a wife and mother. Sometimes even being mothers, they are still forced to live a life of a prostitute.

Therefore, the aspect of motherhood is common in both respectable wife and shameful prostitute. It bridges them together and blurs the gap between the two. Because in both roles, the motherly facet is shown equally loving, caring, passionate and sympathetic. The motherhood dominates both the roles and brings them more close to each other by annihilating the difference of respect, honour, home, commerce, sex, chastity etc.

By highlighting the same theme through their fiction, both Maupassant and Manto have given a depth of insight about the prevailing social institutions which have double standards built in the way women are treated. Therefore, the selected authors also show that neither of the institutions is less oppressive and exploitative towards woman. Both the institutions also play an important role in shaping her sexuality.

C) Motherhood

Beauvoir in her influential The Second Sex states that ―the wife is the property of the man to whom she provides children…She looks more like a servant in work and motherhood than an associate‖ (115). In human history, woman also has been treated as a property of man. She has never been considered equal to him. In different stages, she is only taught how to play different submissive roles. She is never given a chance to escape the submissive role of daughter, wife and mother, to become man‘s partner.

The different aspects of motherhood, considered as ―the only real fulfilment for woman‖ (Stubbs 123), are presented in various short stories of both Maupassant and Manto. The role of mother is an extension of her role as wife. Motherhood has many facets in their stories. Both writers were brave enough to present the unconventional forms of motherhood such as prostitute-mother, mothers of sick children, lover-and-mother (one who could not choose between motherhood and love, passion and sexuality, thus decided to be simultaneously both). We have domestic mothers, prostitute mothers and a type of mother who is particularly found in Manto‘s stories and is named ‗mother-woman‘. Most ‗mother-woman‘ characters of his stories are inclined towards this affection, even when they are not natural mothers. They 249 behave like mothers even with their lovers, friends, clients etc. They treat them as their children as in the case of Manto‘s famous characters such as Janki and Mammy. Like many other dimensions of woman, motherhood is a powerful aspect of Manto‘s female representation. In their personal life, both Maupassant and Manto were more attached to their mothers than fathers. In fact, Maupassant had seen his mother‘s struggle and experienced her love and affection towards children. This aspect of their lives in a way affected their art.

In Maupassant‘s story ―Florentine,‖ a character begins to narrate a strange story on the subject of ‗women‘ to his friends. At the outset, he comments that women are ―always the same, as you know, plain, weary, drooping, walking, with that quick step and that air of imbecile disdain which they assume, I know not why‖ (Maupassant 407). Then the story shockingly reveals the life of a suppressed and poor woman who was driven to sell her body. When the narrator, in order to spend a night with her, forced her to reveal the truth about the person she was talking to behind the walls, she replied that there was no one she would talk to. However, on the narrator‘s persistence, she told him the truth about her child, Florentine, a twelve years old boy. The tragedy was that she did not know who his father was. She was exploited and like other ―girl mothers and public girls…who become the hideous prey of the wandering male with money in his pocket‖ (Maupassant 408). She only knew ―all the shame and misery of women‖ (Maupassant 408). When the narrator tells her that she had made a trade with her conscience, she sighed resignedly: ―One must do what she can‖. This story besides being an in-depth study of a mother-child relationship and her misery also highlights the helpless economic situation of women. Their basic necessities of life force them to become prostitutes.

In the presentation of motherhood or mother characters, Manto‘s short stories contrast slightly with the short stories of Maupassant. There is a sort of in-between- ness in female characters regarding motherhood. Motherhood is constructed in different ways by society. Manto has shown how society has directly associated motherhood, for which marriage is prerequisite, with ‗sex‘. Therefore, female sexuality is either directly associated with motherhood or prostitution.

Manto‘s ―Sarak ke Kinare‖ (On the Roadside) presents a unique story in a very gifted and sublime way. Mumtaz Shireen says that this story is about a unique and special relationship of an unusual man with an unusual woman (140). Manto‘s 250 treatment of sex in this story is different and sublime because he understands sex and sexuality as an inborn, inherent, natural and true passion, which remains always healthy. Earlier, his concept of sex was only limited to the body, claims Shireen, but thereafter it became so sublime that he gave the meanings of ‗perfection of existence‘ and ‗amalgam of souls‘ to it (141).

In ―On the Roadside,‖ Manto shows how difficult it becomes for a woman to survive when she is impregnated and left alone by her lover. The story very sympathetically presents the aspect of a mother in a woman. It further describes the conflict of the woman and her psychological distress regarding her baby who is born out of wedlock. The protogonist‘s situation resembles with the situation of a mother and her baby in The Scarlet Letter by American novelist Hawthorne. In the words of Shireen, ―there is a wounded soul in Manto‘s ―On the Roadside‖, wounded and shivering soul of a woman and mother‖ (88). It is not only the tragedy of a baby‘s death, but the death of motherhood in a mother, who herself let her child die.

The story ends with a newspaper report about a baby found outside the village confines. Further, through this report, Manto predicts the similar future of the female child as of her mother. When she grows up as a woman, Manto seems to say that she too will meet the same fate. She too will succumb to that sin which her mother had once committed. Further, in the report, Manto has used the word ―callous hearted‖ for the person who has strangled the baby‘s neck with a cloth. Now, who actually is ―callous hearted‖? Is it the father, mother, or society? The sin was not committed by the mother alone, but the father was equally responsible it. However, it is only the woman who is made to feel ashamed of the act, whereas man is left scot free.

D) Partition - A Meaningless Violence by Patriarchal Ideology

Besides prostitution, the partition of 1947 is another strong aspect of Mano‘s stories which can be read in two ways, exploring the two points-of-view. He has simultaneously brought forth the psychobiography and historical analysis. He has analysed the partition as a psychologist, ―probing the wounded recesses where individual and community colluded in doing violence to themselves and to others in cause of self-assertion‖ (Gopal 91). Therefore, while analyzing the masculinity crises in his stories, particularly in partition ones, Manto has also shown to the world the hidden realities of oppression and exploitation of woman, especially by placing them 251 at the centre in his stories. According to Alok Bhalla, ―Manto‘s mode of narration is not separable from his vision of our moral condition during the partition; it is rather a part of his exploration of the social and psychological conditions which can lead all of us into evil‖ (―The Politics of Translation‖ 22).

Each partition story by Manto tries to locate every instance in the chronological line from the beginning of the nationalist struggle and political upheavals up to the Partition and its aftermath. From ―A Day in 1919‖, which like the popular account of the French Revolution, is the recasting of the wake of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, to his masterpiece of Partition narrative ―Toba Tek Singh‖, Manto has revealed most candidly every aspect of the partition of India. These stories are generally divided into two sets, as categorized by Alok Bhalla, in his article ―Dance of Grotesque Masks: A Critical Reading of Manto‘s ‗1919 ki Ek Baat‘‖. The first set, written just after 1947, is ―vituperative, slanderous and bitterly ironic‖ (Bhalla 175). The second set of stories about the partition was written between 1951 and 1955. But unfortunately, these stories have not been systematically arranged or analysed as the first set was. According to Bhalla, ―if the first set of stories are fragmentary, spasmodic and unremittingly violent; the stories of the second set are more complex and more concerned with the deep structural relationship between the carnage of the Partition and human actions in the past‖ (―Dance of Grotesque Masks‖ 176).

Priyamvada Gopal has used Walter Benjamin‘s formulation, ‗documents of barbarism‘, to describe Manto‘s partition stories. These stories powerfully depict the violence and trauma resulting from the birth of the two countries. During the partition, ordinary and common people turned into ‗brutal perpetrators of violence‘ and most importantly ‗violence was constitutively gendered and sexualized‘ (Gopal 101). Menon and Bhasin further clarify the role of gender and sexuality by pointing out to ―a preoccupation with women‘s sexuality [which] formed part of the contract of war between the three communities‖ (44). Therefore the violence of partition was highly gendered which shocked the Progressive writers who were imagining the Utopian freedom. Such an extent of brutal violence had never been thought of by them.

Manto‘s partition stories depict violence of different types: Firstly, the bloodshed and killings, and secondly the violence against the other gender, especially 252 the tragic and traumatic experiences of murder and rape inflicted on women. According to Hirsh Sawhney, in his masterpiece on the Partition, ―Toba Tek Singh‖ Manto has used ―satire to convey the political absurdity of partition, which turned friends and neighbours into enemies overnight‖ (N. pag.). He ‗tackles the brutality head-on‘ in his ―Cold Meat‖ in which the female body, even as a corpse, is not spared by male lust— Isher Singh inadvertently committed an act of necrophilia in the story.

Partition critics such as Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin have closely studied the Partition from a feminist perspective and relate the violence inflicted on women to the creation of nation and community. Their bodies become metaphors and symbols for different purposes. According to them:

The range of sexual violation….stripping; parading naked; mutilating and disfiguring; tattooing or branding the breasts and genitalia with triumphal slogans; amputating breasts; knifing open the womb; raping, of course; killing fetuses - is shocking not only for its savagery, but for what it tells us about women as objects in male constructions of their own honour. Women‘s sexuality symbolizes ‗manhood‘; its desecration is a matter of such shame and honour that it has to be avenged. (43)

Manto‘s partition stories also recognize the violated body that became the site for all types of violations. Among the violated bodies of the partition, the major figures of victims were ‗abducted women‘ who were forced to migrate from one part of the country to another (Jauch 189). They lost their relations and were subjected to horrific rapes, abduction by men and various other forms of violence. Through their depiction, Manto‘s concern for them can be seen clearly not only in the history and politics but in moral degradation and female oppression. Veena Das in her article ―National Honour and Practical Kinship: Of Unwanted Women and Children‖ discusses how the bodies of these women became a sign of the Partition and a site of violence in two different masculine discourses during the Partition. One is through the perpetration of violence (during disorder) and the other, through the politics of remembering and forgetting (in restoring normalcy) (Das 62). At the beginning of ―I Swear by God,‖ (Khuda ki Qasam) Manto ponders: 253

I often wondered why these women were called abducted women. Under what circumstances were they abducted? To seduce or abduct a willing woman is a most romantic feat in which man and woman participate alike... But what kind of abduction is this where you clap a helpless and defenseless woman in a darkroom? (Manto103; qtd. in Alter 95)

Nigar Azim too has analysed Manto‘s short stories about Partition and its aftermath of the trauma of the women victims. According to him, the characters of ―Thanda Ghosht‖ and ―Khol Do‖ are dead in life and those who died literally became immortal. This was not only because of the depth of thought of Manto but also because of his art and techniques that made his stories unique. After realizing his sin, Isher Singh dies but the humanity in him awakes and lives on. Similarly, the unconscious action of half-dead Sakeena in ―Khol Do‖ still reverberates with the tragedy that had befallen on her during the Partition riots.

Manto‘s ―Open it‖ reverses the narrative of honour by presenting a very thin line between patriarchal violence and patriarchal protection, because in this story Sakeena becomes more the victim of patriarchal protection than patriarchal violence. She is raped by her own community of rescue team. The rescue operation in this story has ‗material, symbolic and political significance‘ (Gopal 109-10).

Through this story, Manto has highlighted that the communal ideology of paternalism was the same on both sides - attackers and rescuers. Menon and Bhasin are apt to quote with regard to the communal violence of Partition. ―… for women, it was not only miscreants, outsiders or marauding mobs that they needed to fear - husbands, fathers, brothers and even sons could turn killers‖ (1998; 255). Therefore, the line between ‗protection‘ and ‗attack‘ is reduced, thin and tenuous. In fact, this story highlights the collusion between masculinity, patriarchy and national identity. It attacks the discourses of nationalism and patriarchy under which woman suffer the most. However, the irony is that this story was banned including the journal Naqush in which it was published for ‗disturbing the peace‘ which the story basically questions.

The scarf that covers Sakeena symbolizes the honour which her father could not protect. His efforts in saving it made a critical situation for both of them. He lost 254 her and the forthcoming physical and psychological violation is the aftermath of that patriarchal honour. According to Priyamvada Gopal, there is a hint in this act that her father, Sirajuddin, has unwillingly traded Sakina for the scarf that stands for her ‗modesty‘ (110).

In nationalist and communal discourse, ‗woman‘ represents patriarchal honour, like prostitute, widow and rape victim represent patriarchal depredations, and much of progressive writings have enormously highlighted these discourses of society. Suddenly in communal circumstances, woman becomes the honour of man, who used to objectify and exploit her. The site of honour and of pleasure, she suffers the worst from both communities.

Manto has dealt with these issues in many of his partition stories. He shows how characters indulge in wreckful violence upon others, not because of some religious or nationalist fervour but simply because of some powerful ideological influences. This becomes so powerful that it forces them to indulge in meaningless violence. The subtle power of any ideology is that it traps one without letting him/her know that whatever he/she is doing is actually happening under the influence of the ideology. In his essay ―Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation,‖ Louis Althusser states that ideology insinuates itself into the lives of individuals and transforms them into subjects against their will. Because it further makes them submit freely to their subjection, he equates ideology to ―misrecognition‖ (196).

Manto‘s stories such as ―Cold Meat,‖ ―The Woman in the Red Raincoat,‖ ―The Price of Freedom,‖ and ―Open It‖ highlight the strong desire for meaningless violence during the Partition. For instance, in ―The Woman in the Red Raincoat,‖ psychological violence is shown as more dangerous than physical. It imprints deeper than physical. During the Partition, woman became the victim of the both. The protagonist, without being given a proper name, of the story is simply called as ‗S‘. He is an amalgamation of various paradoxes. He is fond of games but hates sports. He is not cruel by nature but cannot resist being the first person to get into an argument or fight. Moreover, he is interested in art but willingly opens a bicycle shop. His contradictory characterization illustrates that man is full of contradictions and the reality can never be grasped entirely in one glance. 255

After the protagonist‘s own shop is burned down, he too decides to join looters and arsonists. He feels comfortable in the ongoing brutal chaos. Earlier, he would be terrified after hearing some story of riots. Now, he enjoys the world as a foreign, strange and an inhuman place. Paradoxically, he is now calm in disturbed situations. Like Isher Singh in ―Cold Meat‖, he too desires to pick up a girl, but his real intention is not clear, as his character is full of ambiguity and paradox. Thus he kidnaps a hysterical and terrified woman to a distant dark place. Instead of using physical force, he employed language to seduce her. He introduces himself as a sophisticated man. Here, it is shown that discourse is much powerful than physical violence. Through discourse, an extreme kind of victimization and manipulative control can be achieved, and this discourse is the typical vector for patriarchal ideology. The character of ‗S‘ illustrates another characteristic of patriarchy; it is primarily a paradox which shows itself as normalcy whereas the sole purpose is to sustain violence. Thus we can see how apparently ‗S‘ shows himself as a normal subject but is actually a patriarchal subject who overcomes the denial and resistance of the hysterical woman. But after seeing her wrinkled face with white hair, he rejects her. Thus the expectations of both the characters are murdered.

In the story, Miss ‗M‘, the abducted woman, is actually a respected art teacher. Her self-proclamation as man-hater was just a masquerade which became evident when she easily came under the control of ‗S‘. Her apparent indifference towards a male was a farce because when she got a chance to love in the dark with ‗S‘, she accepted it. Thus her character is also presented as a paradox. She is the ―real‖ other of abjection, that is, exclusion, in terms of Judith Butler. According to her, abjection means a ―degraded or cast out status within the terms of sociality‖ (243 BTM). Here, Manto unveils the violence underlying the asymmetrical relationship between the phallic subject and the other.

The victimized women in Manto‘s partition stories such as ―Open It‖ or ―Cold Meat‖ became a symbol of other nation and community, which is why raping, brutally killing and conquering these women would mean conquering that nation or community they belonged to, and this was only to show their masculine superiority and colonial domination. (Tracol-Huynh 78).

Harveen Sachdeva Mann in her article ―Woman in Decolonization: The National and Textual Politics of Rape in Saadat Hasan Manto and Mahasweta Devi‖ 256 illustrates the negative link between nationalism and gender by quoting Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. She criticizes Manto for his passive depiction of female victims. Manto has not given them any subjectively, rather they are presented as mere symbols or signifiers or ―metaphor of the nation-as-despoiled woman‖ (Mann 127). Further, she criticizes all those Manto‘s critics and scholars who, according to her, would close their eyes when a female character is marginalized and used as an object. They could see nothing but the powerful style and art of composition for which they have praised him, and shut their eyes to vigilant scholarly investigations when it comes to the passive representation of women victims; because if they would do so, the finger would have been raised towards their own ‗self‘ which they would never wish. According to Mann, they have never expressed a single word about that silent raped woman, whom Manto has not made his subject but has only presented her as a symbol to demonstrate the pain of partition. Harveen Mann‘s argument is true; however, it cannot be generalized to the whole oeuvre of Manto. She has only selected his two partition stories. Whereas the truth is that Manto is not silent in every story, nor is every story of a passive representation of female victimization. He has given her the power of resistance, as in ―Hatak‖, ―Hundred Candle Power Bulb‖, ―Mozil‖, ―Khushiya‖ etc.

Manto is known for his partition stories and he has been praised for depicting the horrors of partition. But sometimes he is too much immersed in presenting the horrors that he forgets to give the women characters their own identity and existence. He has portrayed them only as mediums and metaphors of the pain of partition in his powerful ―male‖ narratives (Mann 128). The rape of a woman‘s body is metaphorically presented as the rape of the body of the nation, so woman‘s body is not a subject but only a thing to represent the other body. This ―way and angle‖ or ―seeing‖ of Manto is actually what Higgins and Breda Silver call as ―ambivalence of male texts‖ (5). Manto, by leaving out the rape scene of the subject, has thus left a space for readers to make it visible again. This ―gap‖ is also called ―subversive presence‖. Further, by portraying women as passive, without any subjectivity, in his few stories, the author has thus denied their role in resistance or in nationalism.

In Manto‘s stories such as ―Thanda Gosht‖ and ―Khol Do‖, the female body is raped and subjected to ―cruelty, barbarity and bestiality‖ (qtd. in Mann 130). In the former story, Isher Singh rapes a dead body and still the author claims that he has 257 humanity in him which rendered him impotent. Thus it is Isher Singh who becomes the hero and the subject of the story, not the innocent girl who was raped even though she was dead (Murdered). She is, for the author, just a symbol - firstly to represent the turmoil of the period and secondly for representing Ishar‘s psychological state, affected by the uneven situation of riots. In other words, the development of humanity in him and thus a kind of hope amidst those horrible times is the real crux of the story. According to Harveen Mann, Manto could not even escape the powerful masculinist narrative in which Kulwant Kaur is described as highly sexual like a kettle on high fire, as a stereotype of a Punjabi Sikh woman (130). And similarly, in his anther story ―Open it‖, Sakina is presented as passive and vulnerable for simply being a female - ―fair, very pretty…about seventeen‖. Further, Harveen Mann censures Manto for remaining complicit with patriarchal cultural and textual structures which are true at least so far as these two stories are concerned.

Against Hareveen Mann‘s accusation of objectification of women as metaphors and symbols for nationalism and communalism in Manto‘s stories, Prayamvada Gopal argues that many writers have represented women in their writings which conveys two aspects as for their presentation is concerned - woman as subject and woman as metaphor. Manto has presented her as a subject in most of his stories without mystifying her body as a metaphor. As a subject, he has given her the status of a heroine who is able to express herself, rather than to become a means as a body to convey the larger message such as Partition. In his stories, particularly on prostitution, ―the female body comes to represent social stratification and exploitation‖ (Gopal 96).

Further, According to Priyamvada Gopal, Manto‘s ―post-Partition short fiction is an agonized exploration of maleness in relation to the violence of nation formation; the connections he made between masculinity, community and violence resulted in a furore over several of his stories‖ (5) of ‗Black Marginalia‘ and his post-Partition work in general. Manto has written:

For a long time I refused to accept the consequences of the revolution which was set off by the partition of the country. I still feel the same way; but I suppose in the end I came to accept this nightmarish reality without self-pity or despair. In the process, I tried to retrieve from this man-made sea of blood, pearls of a rare hue, by writing about the single minded dedication with which men had killed men, about the 258

remorse felt by some of them, about the tears shed by murderers who could not understand why they still had some human feelings left. (qtd. in Gopal 121-22)

Therefore, from the pre-Partition to the post-Partition stories, Manto has written a literary history of those unheard voices which were never heeded to. His uniqueness is his belief in humanity. It needs a lot of courage, persistence and understanding to find pearls in the sea of blood of Partition.

7. Conclusion: A Multi-dimensional Representation.

The female figure emerges in the short stories of both the writers as multidimensional and mysterious. True to her nature, being fundamentally marked by ambiguity, she is portrayed as a complex being. These mysterious qualities of woman, which inherently separate her from man, are also noted by De Beauvoir as:

To say that woman is mystery is to say, not that she is silent, but that her language is not heard; she is there, yet she is hidden behind veils; she exists beyond these uncertain appearances. What is she?…It may be supposed either that there are answers to these questions which are impossible to discover, or…that no answer is adequate because a fundamental ambiguity marks the feminine being‖. (400-1)

Further, Scott argues, ―if...she is a sign of multiple Otherness (chaos, darkness, atavism, twilight, other worlds, even death) then her outstretched arms desire, in the male imagination, to draw the male down into that Other world‖ (38). Similarly, Maupassant‘s female characters take the shape of Diana the Huntress. By giving her power to revolt and stand against oppression Maupassant, like Manto, has described her as a huntress who annihilates the traditional images of woman. In ―L‘Inconnue‖ (The Unknown), Maupassant describes one of his female characters as ―That heavy, vague look, […] similar to those thick liquids used by octopuses to darken the waters and put their prey to sleep‖ (229), and further as, ―she who would have lured me like a little bird with the bait of her flesh‖ (TCSSM 226).

While both Maupassant and Manto cannot be blamed for denying their female characters a sexual autonomy and subjectivity, yet what sets them apart from other female writers who have also attempted the same is their ―male‖ perspective while describing these female characters. Even if they have given these characters a voice to 259 speak for themselves, yet both the authors‘ voices intervene and interfere. Further, the representations of woman characters, particularly in the two selected authors, are different from other woman writers of France and India in the respective times, in that the male authors represent them in order to achieve an aesthetic aim, whereas women writers highlight the issue for ‗women‘s cause‘.

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CHAPTER VII

267

Conclusion

The seemingly incomparable study of the short stories of Maupassant and Manto has been a challenging task to compare from a feminist perspective since both the writers, acknowledged as the masters of modern short stories, belong to the two different kinds of literatures, cultures, ages and literary sensibilities. However, irrespective of all these differences, their literary works, particularly short stories, bear many undisputable resemblances. Both the writers have seen the world through the same lens and highlighted its unbalanced power structures beneath the illusionary and fabricated masks of different power controlling institutions. The dominant subject and focus of their short stories is the life of oppressed classes of the society and people from different marginalized sections. They have strongly raised their voice for them criticized the hypocrisy of society. Both the writers have created memorable characters, especially of women from lower-classes like prostitutes. They could plunge deep into their psyches and reveal their agony of emotions, bruised soul, heart- wrenching condition, burning agitation, palpable desires and flattering hope. Throughout this project an attempt has been made to study both the writers from a feminist perspective and concentrate particularly on the select short stories that focus on the relationship between woman and society, the oppressed and the oppressor. Since both Maupassant and Manto were prolific short stories writers, they have some three hundred short stories each to their credit, based on the various subjects. They have treated their literary productions as realistic in nature - a product of their focused observations and experiences. It becomes, therefore, more difficult to draw the parallels and point out a single or two conclusions and common threads of thought out of the varied oeuvres. However, by a thorough comparative study of the stories and other research works done already on them, the study has pointed out some conclusions which are summed up into five chapters of the thesis, excluding the introduction and conclusion. Firstly, an attempt has been made to bridge the gap between the two writers and explore the unexplored area of their short stories. It has been argued that despite various similarities, the female representation in their writings strongly contrasts with each other. Maupassant‟s stories are full of misogynist elements and racial 268 stereotypes; whereas, in Manto‟s stories, the sympathetic attitude dominates and overshadows the unconscious misogynist elements, if any. The elements of misogyny found in Maupassant‟s short stories such as “A Public Meeting,” “Allouma” “Marroca,” “Babette,” et cetera are the result of two major influences on him. First, as also pointed out by one of his critics G. Hainsworth, was the influence of Schopenhauer‟s theories against women. Second was the influence of collective attitude of men towards women; particularly, as a result of crises and chaos of sexuality with the emergence of feminist progressiveness during the second half of the nineteenth century in France. Further, in his stories based on his Algerian experiences, the misogynist attitude could be the result of the general consciousness of a colonizer towards native women. Whereas, Manto‟s more sympathetic attitude towards downtrodden women, especially prostitutes, has been an outcome of his own personal sensitivity and the changing socio-cultural atmosphere of 1930s and1940s in India. Focusing on the stands both the authors have taken towards the woman and her representation in their stories, the study ventures to draw conclusions which sometimes contrast with the studies done before. The short stories of both the writers have strongly questioned the dominant notions and powerful institutions of society which have defined femininity in their own ways and have restricted female sexuality strictly within binary oppositions. One of the main focuses of the thesis has been to point out how female sexuality, first of all, is constructed by the patriarchal society through binaries, and in this context the focus has been also on the short stories of both Maupassant and Manto to highlight how they have shattered these binary constructions of female sexuality. Moreover, through the technique of close textual reading the instances of the creation of, whether consciously or unconsciously, stereotypes or gendered binaries have been pointed out, and the study has critiqued them from a feminist perspective. For example, at various places, Maupassant has depicted female as „degenerate woman,‟ „mysterious woman,‟ „hysterical woman,‟ „submissive domestic wife,‟ „source of evil‟ etc., but in Manto‟s fiction, these stereotypes and racial marks are hard to find. For him, a woman in every role such as mother, daughter, wife, prostitute etc. always remains a woman, who is first of all a human. Therefore, in the stories of Manto, female emerges as beautiful and sympathetic from within, with a courageous, outrageous and rebellious nature. His female representation has neither been too much idealized as meek, docile, submissive, and „angel in the house‟ nor too much horrible as witch or shrew - she is 269 human first and last. This human aspect, which society ignores to see in prostitutes, has been stressed most in his short stories. Hence, it has been found that these characters play a vital role in annihilating the gender divisions and blurring of various other structures of powerful institutions. The subjective resilient figure of a prostitute in his stories shatters the conventional figure of an ideal woman. For example, in his non-fiction essay “Ismat-Faroshi” (Prostitution), Manto claims that there is no difference between the prostitutes and other so-called virtuous women because their profession is no different from a typist or sweeper, and in fact, they put much more efforts for earning than the others. Written in defence of women, this essay further states that these women have within them sanctity and godly self. It is thus the patriarchal structure in which “men control the present system and are free to think of women as they will” (Manto, Radha 413). Both the writers have written short stories on such subjects like prostitution, sex, and sexuality which were considered taboos, and thus had to bare a strong criticism against their writings. However, the truth cannot be denied that both the writers wrote voraciously against the social, political, economic, religious and other injustice against women. After the close feminist reading of their writings, the similarities and contrasts have shown a more complex and multidimensional representation of the female character who has been presented in many roles; however, her role as a prostitute has been of most interest in the study. As a prostitute, she has various roles to play, the different shades of which can be seen in various stories of the two writers. Sometimes, she becomes the emblem of desire and attraction of patriarchal double standards, and at times she becomes the representative of entire female sexuality. She is presented in mother‟s role even though it goes against her profession. Most importantly, she becomes a model for the emancipation of women. Her earning and rebellious nature deconstructs the traditional role of a loyal, submissive, passive, voiceless object. While Maupassant has been found aesthetically distancing himself from such issues, but Manto is found more concerned and socially involved - first to highlight the issue and secondly, by giving a strong voice and position to female characters to revolt against oppression. It is found that the most important string which connects the two writers is the role of motherhood in their stories. Society has been seen critical in defining the connection between motherhood and female sexuality as if it is the only role which has conventionally been representative of woman identity. Especially, during the 270 nineteenth-century, the increasing focus on the relationship between female‟s reproductive role and her sexuality emerged so strongly that her other roles were overshadowed, and female sexuality was only tagged with motherhood. For example, in Maupassant‟s story “Useless Beauty”, husband thinks of his wife only in terms of procreation, against which the writer‟s strong satirical attitude is obvious in the story. Therefore, it is pointed out that prostitute-mother in the short stories of both Maupassant and Manto shatters all politicized and ideologically charged constructions of female sexuality. Moreover, it is also found that Manto has presented some counter-narratives to „de-objectify‟ the objectified and commoditized female sexuality and body. Female characters, in his short stories, have the privilege of subjectivity, a voice to proclaim their self, a power to resist against the objectification of male gaze. Her body has the power to turn back the male gaze and transform it into terror, which has been associated with the laugh of Medusa, a unique interpretation of Manto‟s story “Khushiya” done in this thesis. The story has been interpreted as an encounter between male and female counter gaze, and Manto has given the latter so much power that it becomes a tool of resistance which turns the male gaze into meaningless and nonexistent. In the story, Khushiya finds Kanta‟s behaviour unnatural: „she was a prostitute, of course, but even they didn‟t behave like this‟ (Manto 59). Because, femininity has been always bound between the boundaries of what is „natural‟ and „unnatural‟ and therefore, Kanta‟s unexpected behavior and smile is at once judged as unnatural, which reminds one of John Stuart Mill‟s famous lines that, “…unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and …everything that is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural” (qtd. in Robbins 21). Therefore, it has been pointed out through the in-depth study of the story that Manto clearly points towards the double standards of patriarchy, which on the one hand sexually exploits women through the institutions like prostitution, but on the other hand, pretends to be civilized and protectors of honour. It was not unnatural for Khushiya to trade Kanta‟s body, but her body itself. Therefore, questions have been raised against the „fixed‟ notions, „set‟ binaries and „transcendental‟ divisions which have been found in the selected texts of both the writers. The dichotomy of women as sensual being, instinctive creature, and men as intelligent thinking masters is solved by highlighting these deep insights of both 271 writers about the social evils and constructed and structured fixities. She is sensual, yet she is demanded as sexless. These complex paradoxes and other images have been questioned and have been even sometimes found in the writings of the two writers as well. The thesis, in the course of five chapters excluding introduction and conclusion, draws various comparisons and contrasts between Maupassant and Manto, and their essential elements pertaining to the feminist study have been explored in all the chapters. Though this thesis is neither essentially a comparative study nor have been the authors studied comparatively in all the chapters; however, it has focused on every element of comparison and contrast from the biographical approach to the close reading to their texts. Chapter I and II are set parallel to each other. Similarly, chapter III in parallel with chapter IV, and in chapter VI the comparative feminist study of the two authors has been discussed on their vast thematic reach. The feminist literary theory has been the major tool to scrutinize the select short stories, which though has not been quoted too often in the chapters of the thesis. However, the background of the analysis has been grounded by the varied texts of feminist theory. Particularly, Simone de Beauvoir‟s The Second Sex needs a special mention to acknowledge the concepts and theoretical framework that it has provided throughout the course of the thesis. Concepts like „sex,‟ „gender,‟ „construction of sexuality,‟ „femininity,‟ institutions of marriage, prostitution, home etc., proved very useful while doing the feminist study of the select short stories of the two writers. Moreover, the detailed background of each period the two authors lived in also helped in understanding the general notions about art, literature, and female representations in literature; because both the periods have been seen as critical in the development of female progressiveness and feminism. In the introduction of the thesis, besides a brief overview of feminism, the relation between feminism and literature has been discussed to point out the significance of the present study. Some comparative works, already written on each writer, have been also briefly noted, with a rationale for the need of feminist study of both writers to explore the yet unexplored area of them. Both the writers - their literary background and writings - have been specifically discussed, and it has been found that though both the authors bear some major outside influences of age and of other literary relationships, yet their own uniqueness and individuality as artists has marked its place in the history of literature. It has been also pointed out in the 272 introductory chapter that how Manto and Maupassant‟s stories show an in-depth play of power structures in the society. Some stories such as “Khushiya” by Manto and “Allouma” by Maupassant have been discussed, though they contrast each other in their attitude towards women, to point out their significance in unveiling the patriarchal biased and racial double standards prevalent in society. At the outset of the second chapter of the thesis, the missing gape in the criticism of the short story during the second half of the nineteenth century has been pointed out. The literature review of the short story genre and criticism in this chapter finds out the period as the most significant in the development of the genre. This chapter basically aims to draw connections between Maupassant‟s personal life and his artistic development. It has been pointed out that his mother‟s inclination towards literature, his literary relationship with Gustav Flaubert and the overall literary attitude of the period was vital in making Maupassant as the master of the modern French short story. Particularly, his literary association with Flaubert, which has been compared with Manto‟s literary relationship with Bari Alig, has been focused, highlighting their emphasis on observation, expression, impersonality, and choice of subject. Lastly, the critical attacks on Maupassant for his selection of subject, related to low-life and sexuality, has been discussed. The multiplicity of his subjects is his real achievement as mentioned by his biographer and critic Steegmuller. Therefore, this chapter has brought forth the total sum of his life, works, and art. Some of the important biographies written on Maupassant have been very helpful both in understanding his life and building up this chapter. Among them, Guy de Maupassant: A Biographical Study by Ernest Boyd, Maupassant: A Lion in the Path by Francis Steegmuller, Guy de Maupassant: A Life by Roger Pearson, “Guy de Maupassant” by Rene Doumic, “Guy de Maupassant” by Henry James, Flaubert and Maupassant: A Literary Relationship by Agnes Rutherford Riddle need special acknowledgment.

Similarly, chapter third of the thesis, based on the life and art of Sadat Hasan Manto, discusses some of the significant aspects of his life which are inevitable for understanding his writings. By discussing the socio-political changes along with the literary changes of the period Manto lived in, the critical contribution of Manto has been pointed out in the development of Urdu short story. He made the genre more innovative, modern, experimental, radical and inclusive as far as subject matter is 273 concerned. Manto‟s ambiguous association with Progressive Writers‟ Movement is also discussed. This chapter also focuses on the influence of European literature on Manto, particularly of Maupassant, and thus points out the strong elements of affinity in their biographical to the artistic journey. Since Manto is known as „Maupassant of India‟ by Mumtaz Sheerin, the chapter attempted to prove it from their writings, as both the writers were committed to exposing the hypocrisy of a society which they have shown without hiding least of it. Further, subjects, themes, and style of the short stories of Manto are discussed in detail; however, the focus of the chapter has been to draw comparisons with Maupassant‟s biographical and artistic life. Here too, it is pertinent to mention few of his biographies which have been essential for this chapter; for example, Manto Katha by Dr. Brij Premi, Sadat Hasan Manto by Waris Alvi, Another Lonely Voice: The Life and Works of Saadat Hassan Manto by Leslie A. Flemming, Manto: Nuri nah Nari by Mumtaz Shireen, and Manto Naama: The Life of Sadat Hasan Manto by Jagdish Chander Wadhawan. The fourth chapter of the thesis is based on an extensive feminist reading of Maupassant‟s short stories. Employing textual interpretative method and after a close reading of the stories, it is found that these stories bear a remarkable influence of the fin de siècle and issue of gender chaos and masculinity crises prevalent in the period. Therefore, many of his stories are found as an assertion of masculinity - for example, stories such as “Bed No. 29” and “Moustache”. Moreover, two types of female representations are found in the stories. One that was common in most of the literature produced by male writers in the period and before. The picture of a woman as incomprehensible, unreasonable, perfidious, meek, docile and submissive housewife, „angel in the house‟, eternally destructive and deadly, and some filled with racial stereotypes: for example stories such as “A Public Meeting,” “Allouma” and “Marroca” etc., can be seen in his stories. The other one is a sympathetic representation of female. She has been presented as a victim of society, oppressed by patriarchy, and exploited by powerful institutions; however, to some degree, Maupassant has given her subjectivity and power to rebel against oppression. The analysis further found Maupassant‟s deep insight into his female characters which has been compared with Manto‟s female representation. Finally, some critical studies of Maupassant‟s critics in this regard have been also brought into the discussion to highlight the criticism against his choice of subject, and his colonial and stereotypical misogynist attitude. 274

Following the same methodology of the previous chapter, the fifth chapter of the thesis is a critical evaluation of Manto‟s short stories from a feminist perspective. At the outset, it has been stated that Manto‟s view about the social construction of sex is astonishingly identical to Simone de Beauvoir‟s. Manto‟s observation that “prostitutes are not born, they are made” sounds similar to Beauvoir‟s “woman is not born, rather becomes one” which points out the social construction of „sex‟ into „gender‟. Further, it is also found that prostitute characters in his short stories enjoy a privileged position, and based on the real observations, these stories target various male-dominated social institutions such as marriage, prostitution, and home, and highlight their hypocrisy and double standards. These stories also raise questions about the hierarchical social system. Prostitution, a dominant theme in his stories, has been claimed by Manto as the creation of patriarchal society. However, prostitute characters were dearest to Manto, and he saw her profession as an assault on conventional economic inequality of woman and thus he could see her as no different from a typist or sweeper. Some similarities and differences of representation of prostitutes in the two writers have been also noted in this chapter. At the end of the chapter, few partition stories have been also critically examined form feminist perspective, and it is found that Manto has pointed out those realities of woman victimization and exploitation which histories failed to see. He found the violence during the partition extremely gendered. Chapter six is a comparative feminist study of some common themes in the short stories of the two writers. It is found that though the themes such as prostitution, domestic life, social inequality, female sexuality etc. are similar, but the writers strongly contrast each other in their attitude towards woman. Thus, Maupassant‟ stories which show the misogynist attitude of the writer have been strongly critiqued from a feminist perspective in order to bring into light the dormant politicized constructions of female sexuality. However, it has been also pointed out that both the writers saw the prostitute characters sympathetically in various stories, and harshly criticized society for its indifference towards them. For example, Maupassant‟s stories such as “Boule de Suif” and “La Maison Tellier” and Manto‟s stories such as “Hatak” (Insult), “Black Shalwar”, “Sharida” clearly point out it. Moreover, it is found that Manto can be called a feminist for his concern for woman emancipation and equality. The masculinity crisis, one of the dominant aspects of Maupassant‟s stories, is also found in Manto‟s stories, for example, in his story “Khushiya”. Besides masculinity 275 crises, “Khushiya” has been found an important story in describing the ideological male gaze; however, Manto was successful in countering it by much stronger female gaze, which has been compared with Medusa, that turned Khushiya into stone, terrified him into nonexistence. Therefore, the female representation in both the writers has been found complex and multi-dimensional. The discovery of their multidimensional portrayal of woman is quite fascinating. It provides a reflection of the society and uncovers many dimensions of female sexuality which has been continuously assaulted by social construction and patriarchal exploitation. In society, the female sexuality is constructed through three main institutions such as home, prostitution, and marriage; however, the boundary differentiating them has been found blurred in short stories of both Maupassant and Manto. The boundary between home and prostitution and the relationship between husband and wife, and client and prostitute is seen very fragile, about which Manto has himself pointed out in his non-fiction essay “Ismat Faroshi” (Prostitution) that has been discussed in detail in this chapter. Lastly, from the Manto‟s partition stories, for which Priyamvada Gopal has used Walter Benjamin‟s formulation, “documents of barbarism”, it has been pointed out that these stories pathetically describe the gendered violence. It has shown how the wall between „patriarchal violence‟ and „patriarchal protection‟ vanished in the partition of 1947, because as Manto‟s partition story “Open it” clearly demonstrates that the communal ideology of paternalism was the same on both sides - attackers and rescuers. However, extreme height of irony is in the fact that this story was banned for „disturbing the peace‟. The overall conclusion of the study is that literature as a platform can be a powerful instrument for both constructing and deconstructing identities, social structures, and binary oppositions. Similarly, Maupassant and Manto‟s fiction can be read from both stances respectively. Since, the subject of sexuality has remained their main focus, their stories have brought out many layers of it, which reminds of the very thorough observation of Nancy Armstrong: “the history of the novel cannot be understood apart from the history of sexuality, and the history of sexuality is also constructed in the pages of fiction” (9). Therefore, as many critics have found a strong element of misogyny in Maupassant‟s stories, the study has unveiled how masculinity myth has been defended and the female sexuality constructed in his fiction. Elizabeth Nolan has also qualified Maupassant‟s fiction as denoting an “androcentric position” and engaging in a “masculinist discourse”. In contrast, Manto‟s short stories have 276 been proved a vital instrument in shattering the binaries created throughout the male discourse of sexuality. By the feminist study of his stories, it is found that his stories highlight the double standards of male discourse, the plight of women under patriarchal social structures, the creation of male-dominated institutions, and lastly stress on the annihilation of gender inequality and not the biological differences. In his famous sketch “Ismat Chughtai” Manto has pointed out: “Let the women fight head and shoulders with men on the battlefields, let them excavate mountains, let them become story-writers like Ismat Chughtai, but their palms should be adorned with henna” (Manto, BM 205). In the same sketch, he further points out the social construction of biological difference as: “I consider it vulgar to label people as “man” or “woman.” It is ridiculous to put up signboards on mosques and temples declaring that they are houses of worship. But from an architectural point of view, when we compare them with residential dwellings we do not ignore their sacred character” (Manto, BM 212).

277

Robbins, Ruth. Literary Feminisms. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Print

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