WOMAN AS CREATOR AND AS CHARACTER IN FICTION

 

 

SPACE OF WOMAN AS CREATOR AND AS CHARACTER

IN FICTION

                  In the words of Elena Ferrante writers as creators should concern only with narrating what they know and feel without succumbing to ideological conformity or blind adherence to canons. Writers depict beautiful, ugly, or contradictory irrespective of being male or female. However, the debate of writers as male or female is not a recent one. Writers have transpassed the passage of time with this baffling debate and their creations try to project the real image of women both as creator and as character. This could be their revolt against the existing social tradition and beliefs.  During tenth century, Hroswitha, a German nun, wrote as woman's voice amidst her male counterparts. She wrote thinking that her voice would be heard as she had close contact with the holy Roman Emperor. Her plays were concerned with the role of women in the church. The Roman world and the medieval world meet in the plays of Hroswitha. In her 'THE CONVERSION OF THAIS THE PROSTITUTE' Paphnutius, the hermit, asserts that body and soul should be in a relation of musical concord. Through him Hroswitha proclaims moral outrage at the sin of Thais, the prostitute, and complains that men impoverish themselves. For her sake men withstand the consideration that men too may be at fault. Despite such rich ideas Hroswitha was not heard but was left isolated in a female environment. Soon after her death the convent to which she belonged was forced to become a satellite of a male ruled monastery. Surprisingly her plays have no stage direction. They are held as literary compositions. A patriarchal bias was there that woman is not to write for performance. Five of her plays are renamed. The protagonists of these plays are male characters. Her voice although suppressed during her lifetime, her theatrical talent emerges later when it is recognized that she is using medieval techniques and her vivid images are paralleled in later medieval drama. She is honored as the forerunner of the drama of later stages to come as she has paved the way for a new trend of theater-- the feminist theater. The feminist theatre concentrates on the question ' What is a woman space?'The feminist theater ensembles formally set out its ideology and quest in a brochure of 1976. The concept of space is very pertinent as far as the study of woman literature is concerned. The space reflects her world.

 Despite this contradictory comments to such ideas of women’s writing at one place question the excellence of woman writers and reflect the traditional patriarchal society's assumption of superiority of male experience on the other. The male experience of the society subdues the space of women and fringes her world within the limited space of domestic responsibilities. V.S.Naipaul, the great Indian traveler, says in an interview that women writers are quite different from male writers. According to him whenever he reads a piece of writing, within a paragraph or two he knows whether it is by a woman or not. He considers these writers unequal to him. Writers who follow such trend, expects women to accept their limited space without argument. However, Helen Brown goes to the extent of saying Naipaul an "arrogant, attention-seeking'' for his comment.

           SHAWALTER ON WOMAN WRITERS:

Showalter finds women’s literature in three long phases, first phase being the phase of imitation of the dominant structures of tradition and an internalization of its standards of art an its views on social roles. This is Feminine phase and it includes women writers such as the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the later generation of Charlotte Yonge, Dinah Mulock Craik, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Lynn Linton and others who felt a conflict of "obedience and resistance". despite abundance of women writers during Victorian period who comprised a healthy segment of the reading public, women writers were left "metaphorically paralyzed in the real sense.

In the second stage, women come out against the traditional standards and values, demanding their rights and sovereignty. In this Feminist phase Some women wrote social commentaries, translating their own sufferings to those of the poor in an acceptable manner. In a completely different direction there came the 1870s sensation novels of Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Florence Marryat.

Militant suffragists also wrote prolifically during this protest phase of literature. Women, such as Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Mona Caird, Elizabeth Robins, and Olive Schreiner, made "fiction the vehicle for a dramatization of wronged womanhood”. According to Shawalter their projects concerned themselves more with a message than the creation of art, though their rejection of male-imposed definitions and self-imposed oppression.

The third period, the Female phase, is characterized by a self-discovery and self-definition. Some writers end up turning inward during the subsequent search for identity. In the early half of Female phase of writing contains the double legacy of feminine self-hatred and feminist withdrawal and a separatist literature of inner space. Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf worked towards a Female aesthetic, elevating sexuality to a world-polarizing determination. However, Showalter criticizes their works for their androgynistic natures.

Showalter's analysis of three phases of women writing(female, feminine, and feminist) shows how the progress of women writing reached the phase to expresses all the conflicts and struggles. Showalter views a female solidarity to exist as a result of "a shared and increasingly secretive and ritualized physical experience... the entire female sexual life cycle." Female writers always wrote with this commonality and feminine awareness in mind lended them "implied unities of culture."

CONCLUSION:

                    Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience instead of being mere male or female. While summing up we can say that ideal and strong projection of women by male writers as well as by women writers contrasts the real social image of women. This could be their disobedience to the in vogue social pattern and behavior. Woman writers from the very ancient time have left profound impact on world culture have tried to give women their voice.  The trend continues and will continue in future.

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