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Sunday, January 4, 2004 |
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Sunday, January 4, 2004 |
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Ascent of the Women: Six Women Poets. A Cross-cultural Study The author does not adopt an aggressive stance to defend these poets’ works. Rather, brief life-sketches interwoven in the narrative, serve to highlight the difference. Be it the ornamental poetry of Sarojini Naidu, the tortured verse of Kamala Das Surraya and Sylvia Plath, the rebel verse of Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich or the detached poetry of Mamta Kalia, their verse speaks for and interprets the truths of their gender. Language and its evolution has always been the male prerogative. However, these poets address the minds of other men and women without being conscious of their own or their reader’s gender. Their works, therefore, need to be judged by two parameters. Firstly, assessing the work on its own merits, irrespective of the gender of the writer. And secondly, thinking why gender makes all the difference. These poets’ preceptors or guides acknowledged their intellectual capacities, but could not provide unbiased encouragement, whether it was Higginson for Emily Dickinson or Edmund Gosse for Naidu. Ted Hughes, himself an acclaimed poet, insists that Sylvia Plath, his wife, was obsessed with her father, that is she had Electra complex. Again Rich’s poetry is said to be ‘too personal, too bitter’. The independent self that these women projected onto their works was ‘corrected’ in imagery, rhythm, punctuation etc re-establishing dominance even at the proof reading stage. All because critics have been conditioned to perceive women’s poetry as being written by the ‘other’ and therefore delve into the basis of the ‘neurosis’ that prompted them to write. However, these women made language their strongest weapon: ‘A Word that breathes distinctly- Has not the power to die’ (Dickinson). The social (read masculine) perception of women as homemakers and passive love objects was hammered into their subconscious, thus weighing them down mentally. It was probably this image that killed Plath. While Mamta Kalia remains a detached spectator of her work, thus retaining her sanity, Plath internalised the anger and shame of not being a successful housewife and mother. Sarojini Naidu, on the contrary, dropped her feather pen (“aesthetics of excess” was the charge levelled against her poetry) to pick up the mike, becoming a powerful ‘voice against excesses’ through her speeches during the freedom movement. In this way she extended the scope of her writing from personal to collective autonomy. These poets’ histories reveal an overbearing father figure in their lives who was responsible for their search for physical and mental space. ‘Tell all the Truth- but tell it slant/ Success in Circuit lies’ is how Dickinson outmanoeuvred her detractors. Even devices such as dashes (creating an illusion of space?) in Dickinson’s poetry or the stilted pithy verse of Plath are attempts at individualised
expression. The moral of the study is self-dependence or Krishna’s swadharma that Naidu recommends. Kamala Das Surraya’s solution too is: ‘For love. must seek at last/ An end, a pure total freedom, it must will the mirrors to shatter’. Plath’s key to shackled thoughts is empowered words: ‘The blood jet is poetry/ There is no stopping it.’ Overthrowing the patriarch is important: ‘I am seriously thinking of disowning you Papa/ You and your sacredness’ (Mamta Kalia). Assuming power over traditional male bastions such as religion is another battle won: ‘For nothing Higher than Itself/Itself can rest upon’ (Dickinson). Commanding public space that women have hitherto been denied is imperative: ‘My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding / with every / act of resistance’ (Rich). Rejecting cultural concepts of a male-dominated world can also help: ‘I’m Czar- I’m Woman now-/ It’s safer so’ (Dickinson). Apart from repeating a para on pages 11 and 64 and not quoting the titles of poems quoted, the book has few irritants. It offers useful insights for gynocritics. A must for students of literature trying to understand why women write as they do. |
Mina Surjit Singh is one of the (predominantly women) academicians from English departments across the country who agree that women writers, whether or not belonging to the categories of jilted lovers, bored heiresses, starving freelancers or frustrated housewives, also write to fulfil the basic urge to create. She is also one of those who help us understand why women’s writing, more often than not, becomes writing about women. The poetry of these selected poets is born of their intense experiences as women. 