SUMMARY
The present thesis is a comparative analysis of the novels of Kiran Desai and Monica Ali, two significant sub-continent contemporary female writers, from the perspective of feminist consciousness so as to trace the female identity and the female struggle in their works and situate the modern female consciousness in the sub-continent as against the western feminist concept.Although the status of woman in society has differed from culture to culture, from country to country and from age to age and in many societies and cultures, as in Indian culture, she has been given a high place, at least theoretically, one feature common to almost all the patriarchal societies is that woman was always considered inferior to man and was excluded from all centres of power. Her only identity was her sexual identity and her body was considered a source of pleasure for the male.She was confined within the four walls of the house; there was no education for her, no participation in centres of power and she was subjected to wide ranging marginalizations.Different religions of the world have given sanction to the female’s subjugation to the male members of the society, thus perpetuating the myth of female servitude.
A woman’s place has been essentially the inner courtyard of home and her language has been one of silence. She has not only been denied existence as a complete human being but has also been deprived of the opportunity to give expression to her feelings and her inner thoughts. The woman was thus subjected not only to marginalizations but also to consistent subject deprivation. Despite the variety of ways in which woman has construed her essential characteristics, she is always the ‘object’, a conglomeration of attributes to be predicted and controlled along with other natural phenomena. The place of the free-willed subject who can transcend nature’s mandates is reserved exclusively for man.
An increasing awareness of the injustices done to women gradually gave rise to the feminist movement wherein the women raised their voice against marginalizations and patriarchal oppressions. The term ‘feminism’ was coined in France in the 1880s by Hubertine Auclert to criticize male domination and to make claims for women’s rights and emancipation promised by the French Revolution. Since then it has always been used as an umbrella term to describe those people who speak, write, fight or feel the need to do so against the oppression faced by women and caused by patriarchy on social, cultural, political, economic, literary and ideological grounds.
Feminism is grounded on the belief that women are oppressed or disadvantaged in comparison to men, and that their oppression is in some wayillegitimate or unjustified.It sets forth the belief that men have controlled and created history, politics and culture, and in so doing have “relegated women as women to the margins of culture, if not to silence and invisibility”. (Benstock 147).
Among the important theorists of feminism (sometimes the term is applied retrospectively) whose work has been seminal are Mary Wollstonecraft, J.S. Mill, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Adrienne Rich, Susan Brownmiller, Mary Daly, Shulamith Firestone, Juliet Mitchell, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, Sandra Lee Bartky, Linda Phelps, Julia Kristeva, Helen Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Whatever the approach or ideology of various feminists and consequently of theorists, one thing that stands is that feminism focuses on women and the problematics of women’s oppression in patriarchy, sexual colonialism, sexual politics and her marginalization, loss of identity, her freedom and the suppression of her point of view.
Feminism not only influenced real life and culture but also creative literature, literary theory and criticism. The Women’s Movement resulted in the emergence of a number of feminist novelists and poets in the West. Feminism entered literature and literary criticism as it did in other walks of life. The emergence of a large number of women writers in almost all the countries of the world, including India, is largely a feature of the twentieth century but it was in the Victorian Age that women came to occupy canonical position in literature. The contemporary feminist research has been successful in rediscovering and rehabilitating a number of writers even before Jane Austen. Elaine Showalter studied the female literary tradition by going beyond Jane Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot to look at a hundred and fifty or more of their sister novelists and saw patterns and phases in the evolution of a female tradition which correspond to the developmental phases of any sub-cultural art. In her book on English women novelists, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977), she designated these three phases in the following manner :
1.The Feminine Phase (imitation of male writers, 1840-1880).
2.The Feminist Phase (Protest, 1880-1920).
3.The Female Phase (Phase of self-discovery-turning to the female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature - on going since 1920).
Contemporary women’s writing in English has moved away from the confines of domesticity to engage with the historical, political, cultural and economic dimensions of the public space. Recent years have witnessed women writers from different regions of the world gaining better visibility in the literary domain. Through their writing practices, these women writers attempt to provide deep and meaningful understanding of the problems, conflicts and struggles of their respective societies. A distinctive body of contemporary writing by women is engaged with issues of caste, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, ecology and gendered violence. Their writings go beyond the domestic spheres of ‘hearth and home’ and they express themselves freely and boldly on a variety of themes. Without adopting feminist postures, these women writers are not holding back in boldly expressing the female’s point of view in their writings. Today, women writers all over the world are making a more conscious and articulate attempt to speak for themselves and of the areas of experiences related to their lives.
With the prestigious Booker Prize to Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things (1997), Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and the Pulitzer Prize to Jhumpa Lahiri for Interpreter of Maladies (2000), women writers’ creativity has received international recognition. Kiran Desai and Monica Ali are two significant and exciting new voices within the context of contemporary postcolonial fiction. Although they come from different countries,India and Bangladesh respectively, they have much in common.
From being acclaimed as South Asian Diaspora authors to communicating through their novels the racial, class and gender discriminations confronted by their characters, building bridges between the First World and the Third World, employing history as basis for their arguments and having won awards for their texts, the two young female contemporary authors – Kiran Desai and Monica Ali – have indeed contributed most valuably to the canon of postcolonial literature. They have also given glimpses of feminist consciousness in their novels which is the focus of the present doctoral investigation.
In order to comparatively analyse the novels of Kiran Desai and Monica Ali from the perspective of feminist consciousness, a comprehensive but uncomplicated scheme of chapter division has been followed. The thesis consists of the following chapters :
Chapter I:Introduction
Chapter II:Female Voice in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.
Chapter III:The Inheritance of Loss and the Loss of Female Voice.
Chapter IV:Marginalization of Women in Monica Ali'sBrick Lane.
Chapter V:Kiran Desai and Monica Ali : A Comparative Study.
Chapter VI:Conclusion.
Chapter (1) is introductory and expository in focus and presentation. There is a brief discussion of the concept of feminism followed by a synopsis of Kiran Desai’s and Monika Ali’s respective novelistic career, influences on their lives and thought processes and a brief introduction to their fictional works.
Feminism is rapidly developing as a significant critical ideology and constitutes a major segment of the contemporary writing in English. It has emerged as a concept that encompasses both a philosophy and a movement for socio-political changes based on a critical analysis of male privilege and women’s subordination within a given society.Fundamentally man and woman are one, their problem must be one in essence. The soul in both is the same. Each is a complement of the other. The one cannot live without the other’s active help. But somehow the fact that, as human beings, there are more similarities than dissimilarities between a man and a woman has been overlooked. The impact of dissimilarities has been too heavy on womanhood. Consequently, man has dominated woman from ages past subjecting her to wide ranging marginalizations in all spheres of life.
An increasing awareness of the injustices done to women gradually made them raise their voice against marginalizations and patriarchal oppressions and in the mid-twentieth century this female consciousness led to the birth of women’s liberation movement which was a serious reform movement aimed at the overall upliftment of women in society. The first voice in favour of women’s right was, however, raised much earlier in the last quarter of the eighteenth century by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of The Rights of Woman (1792) which is considered to be the first major feminist manifesto. John Stuart Mill, in The Subjugation of Women (1869), expressed his belief that women’s oppression was because of the system and attitudes which regulated the social relations between the two sexes. He strongly condemned the legal subordination of one sex to another and considered it the chief hindrance to human improvement.
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), openly attacked the patriarchal society which, according to her, was the root cause of educational, economic and cultural backwardness and disabilities hampering women’s creative, cultural and social growth and development. The feminist movement, which flowered in the west in 1960’s, did a great deal in arresting the injustices meted out to women.
Gradually, it spread across the world and the concept was widened to seek complete rights for women – political, social, economic and educational. In the second half of the twentieth century, it swept across the world making people think about the age-old belief from a newly awakened viewpoint. Feminist not only influenced real life and culture but also creative culture, literary theory and criticism. The movement received tremendous momentum from the pioneers like Simone De Beauvoir who shattered the myth of femininity in her book, The Second Sex, which was published in French in 1949 and was later translated into English. Another famous feminist document was Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). It was followed by Kate Millett’s hard-hitting and influential work Sexual Politics (1969). Kate Millett vehmently criticized the social system which gave men power to perpetuate their unjust domination over women. Germaine Greer, in her book The Female Eunuch (1970), exhorted women to fight for their rights and advocated the abolition of the institution of marriage.
Feminism is essentially a transformative practice which aims at least three things – articulation, analysis and intervention. Outlining the correlation between feminism and literature, Elaine Showalter, one of the seminal figures of the last quarter century of English feminist research, observes:
Feminist criticism began when women, who were students, teachers, writers, editors, or simply readers, began to note the limited and secondary roles allotted to fictional heroines, women writers and female critics, and to ask serious questions about their own relation to literary study. How were women represented in men’s literary texts? What was the relationship between the textual harassment of women and the oppression of women in society? Why were women absent from literary history? (Collier and Ryan 179).
The impact of gender on postcolonial studies was belated but there is now a growing body of work that seeks to define post-colonial feminism(s) and to revisit, if not revive, ideas of a transnational or global feminist solidarity. The ongoing key debates within this highly contested field focus on a wide range of postcolonial diasporas and postcolonial locations including Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, the South Pacific and the Middle East. A panorama of literary texts by contemporary women writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Assia Djebar, Zoe Wicomb, Kiran Desai and Monica Ali deal with issues like interrogating feminisms, representation of ‘the’ nation, war, language, home and belonging, motherhood, sexuality, orality, intertextuality and migration.
Kiran Desai, born on 3 September, 1971 in Chandigarh, India, is a South Asian author who is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. Her mother, Anita Desai, is equally famous author whose three books Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984)and Fasting, Feasting (1999) had been short listed for the prestigious Booker Prize.
Kiran Desai’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and received accolades from several notable figures including Salman Rushdie. It went on to win the Betty Trask Award, a prize given by The Society of Authors for the best new novel by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of thirty-five. Her second book, The Inheritance of Loss (2006),was widely praised by critics throughout Asia, Europe and the United States and won the 2006 Man Booker Prize.
Monica Ali is the daughter of an English mother and a Bangladeshi father. She was born in Dhaka, but brought up in the northern English town of Bolton from the age of three. She has an Oxford degree in English, a management consultant husband, but retains an apparently abiding concern for many things South Asian. Monica Ali is the latest of the growing group of British novelists of colonial origin – from Hanif Kureishi and Meera Syal to Zadie Smith – who constitute an imaginative and inventive group that grapples with the clash of cultures.
Monica Ali’s debut novel, Brick Lane (2003), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2003. Monica Ali was voted Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists on the basis of the unpublished manuscript. Besides Brick Lane, Monica Ali has written three other books – Alentejo Blue (2006), In the Kitchen (2009) and Untold Story (2011). Her first novel, Brick Lane (2003), is an epic saga about a Bangladeshi family living in the U.K. and explores the British immigrant experience. Alentejo Blue (2006) is a loosely interwomen collection of stories set in and around a Portuguese village. Monica Ali’s latest novel, Untold Story (2011), is a veiled account of the life of Princess Diana. For the purpose of my research, I have focussed on Monica Ali’s Brick Lanebecause, based on immigrant experience, it invites better comparison with Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss which too deals with the same issue though in a different setting.
Chapter II – ‘Female Voice in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard’, is devoted to an analysis of Kiran Desai’s first novel,Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, from the point of depiction of the female characters. In an interview, Kiran Desai revealed that she got the inspiration for her story for this novel from a report in an Indian newspaper about a hermit who had climbed a tree and lived there for several years until he died. Kiran Desai felt so startling with that character that she built a story around it.
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998), which won the Betty Trask Award, is a hallucinating tale of love, faith and relationship. It is a comic tale and is satiric in many ways. Set in the drought hit region of Shahkot, a small town in India poised midway between tradition and modernity, the novel revolves around the whimsical tale of the Chawla family that comprises of an old grandmother (Ammaji), her son (Mr. Chawla), his wife (Kulfi) and their two offsprings – a son named Sampath, the hero of the novel, and a daughter named Pinky, a teenaged girl, who loves an ice-cream seller.
Sampath, the hero of the novel, runs away from his home and takes refuge in the branches of a guava tree. He soon finds himself revered as ‘the Tree Baba’, worshipped by the people of his village and even by the local monkeys as a prophet. However, the monkeys develop an unquenchable thirst for liquor and raise an unprecedented hullabaloo in the hermitage and destroy the peace of the orchard and the town. Humour is the dominating feature of the novel. While some parts of the book are thought provoking, others seem to poke fun at ‘gurus’ and their eccentricities.
Ammaji, Kulfi and Pinky are the chief female characters of the novel. Ammaji is a stereotyped loving mother, dominating mother-in-law and doting grandmother. After Kulfi, Ammaji is the only person who finds no complaints with Sampath, her grandson. She is hopeful for Sampath’s future and says, “the world is round . . . wait and see! Even if it appears he is going downhill, he will come up out on the other side. Yes, on top of the world”. (26).