Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

It takes all sorts to make the world, and so also literature. To hypothesize, therefore, that literature is all of a piece, that it is homogeneous or something like a monolithic structure, would amount to a gross distortion of facts. The glory and splendour of the world of letters is in fact in its myriad singing voices, each contributing in some measure to the grand symphony that permeates it. That one can occasionally hear a few discordant notes does not by any means prove that cacophony and confusion hold their sway. It cannot be denied that some writers have expressed strong anti-feminist sentiments, nevertheless, the fact remains that the over-whelming impression produced by the writers of different times and climes is supportive of, and not hostile to, Women’s Liberation Movement.

It is easy enough to trot out wisecracks by the score in a bid to show that men of letters have been distrustful of women. Here, for instance, is a choice bouquet, if you really care for such a thing: Men are women’s playthings; women are the devil’s. A woman’s counsel brought us first to woe. Frailty! thy name is woman. Women, asses and nuts, require strong hands (Our own Tulasidas has been so much sinned against). When we speed to the the devil’s house, woman takes the lead by a thousand steps. If you would make a pair of good shoes, take for the sole the tongue of a woman; it never wears out. A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all. And there is the arch enemy Milton’s anathema:

Oh, why did God create at last

This novelty on earth, this fair defect of nature?

But enough of this. On my own I would not, in all conscience, have gone on like this in this International Women’s Year but quotations are a different proposition. My purpose, moreover is to caution the unwary not to take these utterances without a generous pinch of salt for the following reasons: men often come out with a provocative impromptu remark to startle those around them; a personal pique may sometimes be the animating power at work; and, finally, an author may be quoted out of context. A dramatic speech, as every Macaulay’s schoolboy knows, does not necessarily reflect the dramatist’s view. A persona cannot be indiscriminately identified with the poet.

Having disposed of the negative, let me now proceed to the positive aspect of the matter to demonstrate, in other words, that writers of weight and substance have tended to throw in their weight on the side of women. This, of course, they have done according to their lights, sometimes bright, sometimes dim. The women’s Lib, as we know it to day, has not all of a sudden come out full-blown like Jupiter from Minerva’s head. Human consciousness has been stirred and influenced for generations before it got to the point from where the movement could be launched. Historical perspective demands that it be related to its obscure beginnings; its hazy anticipations through the continuum of time.

The Greeks are often accused of treating women no better than chattel. Judged by the criteria of mid-twentieth century, they will surely be found wanting (and so shall be we, probably, in our turn by posterity). Plato’s proposal for the community of wives need not, however be placed in a denigrative context; it will perhaps bear a better and more consistent interpretation in terms of cugenics. For Socrates it is immaterial that women bear and men beget children so far as the education of each is concerned. “The gifts of nature are alike diffused in both;” therefore it makes little sense to differentiate between their pursuits. When, of course, it comes to defining their participation in the toils of war and the defence of the country, Socrates recommends the assignment of lighter labours to women. Incidentally, the trials and tribulations of domesticity which a woman is supposed to undergo also call for the greatest courage. As Media in Euripides’ play puts it:

Men say we women lead a sheltered life

At home, while they face death amid the shears.

The fools! I’d rather stand in the battle line

Thrice, than once beat a child.

Socrates, however, cannot get past the ancient prejudice that the woman has some inherent biological handicaps and limitations. It is not until recently that the battle against sexism has been carried the whole hog to establish that what has been traditionally designated as the weaker sex can supply us with first rate pioneers, adventurers, fighters and aeronauts. Nevertheless, one fact stands out distinct and indisputable: the Greek poets and philosophers were very far from desiring their women folk to be cooped up in their warren-like homes.

If women are not shown taking part in actual warfare, nor are they exempt from its dire and disastrous consequences; actually, they have to bear the most excruciating brunt of the aftermath. Euripides in his tragedy The Trojan Women describes that after the ten-year war is over, women suffer the worst depredations. An easy corollary from this to draw is since women are not spared indignity and humiliation of the worst sort, they would be perfectly justified in getting involved in momentous issues of national life. That a woman is not entirely a stay-at-home creature, that she can have a confrontation with the state and all the power that it symbolizes, is vividly dramatized by Sophocles in his Antigone. King Creon allows Oedipus’s on Eteocles, who had defended Thebes, to be buried but he denies to the second son Polyneices, who had attacked the city, the funeral rights that meant so much to the Greeks. Antigone is determined that he shall be decently buried. Divine laws, she declares, are internalized in her conscience against which the mandate of the king is absolutely powerless. In Antigone Sophocles has projected an individual of firm resolve defying the law, free from any vestiges of a woman’s weakness.

Renaissance in Europe was a sharp reaction to the mediaeval outlook on women. * This is best exemplified by the Italian poet Dante narrating how his entry into the Paradise is accompanied by his vision of Beatrice. Similarly, Shakespeare recognizes the role of woman, both as mother and wife, in Coriolanus. When all efforts prove unavailing, the Romans in sheer desperation turn to Volumnia and Virgilia and persuade them to go and to beg of the incensed general poised for attack not to destroy Rome. And this works. It is essentially a tribute to the power of womanhood. In Julius Caesar Portia is shown successfully arguing with her husband Brutus that she has a right to be admitted to his secrets, whatever their nature. This elevation of women to the status of a comrade achieves its fullest flowering in Shakespeare’s comedies. In them we find a world not so much dominated as made radiant by the heroines, by Rosalind, Olivia, Beatrice, Portia and others of their sisterhood. Orlando most certainly meets more than his match when he is admonished by that very Rosalind over whom he is breaking his heart. With her grasp never relaxed on herself, she castigates his sentimentality–a curious instance of the turning of the tables. There is a man who haunts the forest that abuses our young plants with carving “Rosalind” on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on brambles; all, for sooth, deifying the name of Rosalind: if I could meet that fancy-monger I would give him some good counsel, for he seems to have the quotidion of love upon him.

The concept of women’s emancipation, it will have to be ruefully admitted, received a set-back among some writers of the Romantic and the Victorian era. To be afflicted with the desire of the moth for the star is, without doubt, to idealize the woman out of a flesh-and-blood reality, to exile her from a work-a-day world. The chivalric tradition of Sir Walter Scott denuded her of all vitality by reducing her to a more stereotype: abrittle, shy and languishing female waiting to be supported like an ivy by a strong oak tree. Tennyson mocked at her attempt to achieve an equal status with men in The Princess. Ruskin tried to beguile her by vain and inane rhetoric: “Wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glow-worm in the nightcold grass may be the only fire at her foot; but home is yet wherever she is.” But this back-sliding was to some extent countered by the Brontes. Catherine in Wuthering Heights asserts her absolute equality with Heathcliff. Jane Eyre refuses to be treated condescendingly by the wealthy Rochester. She comes back to him when he is maimed and blinded and needs help. The typical Bronte heroine stands on her own feet, braving all the stresses and strains of a rough world and making her own living. Nothing thrills her more than the prospect of economic independence; she longs to install herself in a seminary of her own. The modern working woman is right there.

A woman is not a sweet song-bird in a gilded cage; she is very much a creature of the earth, earthy–by obscuring this fact men had managed to wrap her up in a cocoon of illusion. The Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen set himself to destroying it. When he causes Nora Hialmer in A Doll’s House to walk out in protest against her husband’s treatment, the slamming of the down-stairs door was heard around the world. Its obverse picture is presented in Ghosts where Ibsen shows the outcome of stifling one’s vital impulses for the sake of dead conformity. Through Mrs. Alving’s empty and frustrated life, he wants to emphasize the need on the part of a woman never to submit to obsolete social usages.

George Bernard Shaw, continuing with Ibsen’s feminist crusade, takes delight in puncturing the inflated male ego in Candida. The woman in the play ultimately decides to stand by her husband in preference to her poet-lover because the former, being the weaker of the two, needs her more. In You Never can Tell and some other plays he brings out the supremacy of the woman as the instrument of life-force. It is true that in insisting on woman’s parity with, if not superiority to man, Shaw has deglamourized the woman. But that is as it should be. The modern woman cannot in all fairness want incense to be burnt at her altar even as she presses her claim to rub shoulders with men. For this, naturally, she has to come off her lofty pedestal. Shaw seems to be saying, in effect, that she cannot eat the cake and have it too.

Although I have referred to some Victorian’s less-than-fair attitude towards woman (which again should be clearly distinguished from the misoginistic outbursts of a writer like August Strindberg) I should be unhappy indeed to pass by, without a salute, John Stuart Mill who put to admirable use his reasoning powers and his lucid prose in his spirited The Subjection of Women. Free from personal servitude, no longer a domestic drudge, the woman, so runs his famous argument, should have an occupation, should think and write and teach. There is no question why the franchise should not be extended to her. Difference of sex, he contends in Representative Government is as essentially irrelevant to political rights as difference in height or in colour of the hair. All human beings have the same interest in good government.” When the very efficacy of the ballot box was in dispute, even during its early stages the suffragist movement had Mill’s blessings.

For the foregoing, it would appear that barring a few exceptions (and the rich tapestry of literature is woven of various strands) sensitive and perceptive writers have all along been preparing the way for women’s emancipation. There is hardly any significant facet of women’s lib which has not figured in their works. They have been urging that discrimination based on sex should go, that different pursuits and educational and career opportunities should be thrown open to them. They should be free to operate both within and outside home. Their role vis-a-vis the state as well as the family has been defined without any prejudice to their sex. The random sampling of literary evidence that I have made available shows how the most dynamic, and energetic minds have responded to the perennial woman question. If the progress has not been as fast as one would desire, the reason seems to be that the masses take a lot of time in being wakened from their sloth, apathy, superstition and obscurantism. But for the writers, the progress that we witness today would not have been there for the din and dust of battle raised by the activists and agitators soon die away whereas the word alone endures.

Although, as I have said above, most of the significant facets of the Liberation Movement can be traced in literary works, implying their author’s approval, support for the extremist tendencies of the militant feminists is, however, hard to come by Rejection of the family, repudiation of the biological function of harbouring the seed, sheltering the fetus and bringing forth the child or renouncement of sexual pleasure which requires the involvement of a male are popular slogans and shibolleths of the female chauvinists–they have seldom, if ever, found articulation in the kind of literature that I have been drawing upon. Of course they bulk large in propagandistic or doctrinaire writings. A character like Media may inveigh against giving birth to children, or a wife may take pleasure in deliberately producing a castrating effect on her husband in the nightmarish world of Strindberg. Such attitudes are, however, shown to be pathological and abnormal. That a large proportion among women themselves would not subscribe to these new-fangled notions is a clear vindication of the sanity and the good sense of the writers.

The culmination point of this movement cannot but be beyond the narrow confines of the “battle of the sexes.” “The cause of women’s liberation,” it has been rightly observed, “is now joined in the minds of many of its protagonists with the cause of the whole human race.” One has only to point to such characters as Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and to Mrs. Moore and Mrs. Ruth Wilcox in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Hoards End to show that writers of rich sensibility see in woman not only the potentiality and strength of fighting for her own rights but also the intuition, delicacy and comprehension, carrying her tremendous capacity of conservation beyond her home out into the big world. Writers like Woolf and Forster are visualizing for the woman, need from domestic chores, petty tyrannies and others hindrances, a role on which will devolve the destiny of mankind.

* So little store was set by a woman in the Middle Ages that if man slew a young girl he was required, according to a ninth century Germanic legal code, to pay her master 200 solid, a mere pittance. She was so much taken for the domestic animal, of man that the Bishops at one Church Council seriously debated as to whether she had a soul or not.

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

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