The feminist movement in the world of literature has had a past made up of struggles to be heard by the male-dominated mainstream and attempts to retrace the past to find over-looked texts that had been previously ignored. Women writers from all over the world have taken part in this struggle. It was not until recent history that women writers have seen a shift away from being silenced by the male mainstream. Female writers are now regarded as legitimate writers, but the struggle is far from over. However, the work that has been done by feminists has opened up the world of literature to a new perspective in some texts.
Women’s literature has seen growth and more recognition from the mainstream of literary study. Works from women’s writers are becoming re-discovered and are more available for study by students of literature. Annette Kolodny points out in her essay “Dancing Through The Minefield” that “this increased availability of works by women writers led, of course, to an increased interest in what elements, if any, might comprise some sort of unity or connection among them” (172). One element that can be found in many works of women’s literature is the theme of overcoming or struggling to overcome oppression or societal conditioning in order to become aware of his or her identity. Since the writers of women’s literature are struggling with this very task, it is no surprise that many of the works of female writers contain this theme. In this essay, I am going to look at six pieces of women’s literature that show, in varying degrees, the struggle of certain characters to overcome some type of oppression or societal conditioning to become aware of her own identity. The literature that I will look at in this essay includes novels by: Margaret Atwood, Jean Rhys, Buchi Emecheta, Joy Kogawa, Keri Hulme, and Marie-Claire Blais. Each of the novels that I discuss uses different literary techniques to illustrate the struggle of females in society.
Both Jean Rhys and Margaret Atwood use unreliable narrators in their novels to illustrate the struggles of women. Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is told through the voice of both Antoinette and her husband, Rochester. Throughout the novel, Antoinette is struggling to overcome the oppression of her imperialistic husband. She had grown up with a rough childhood that included many tragedies and a family that was prone to madness. The history of madness in Antoinette’s family, mainly in her mother, caused her husband to treat his wife as a lunatic. A letter written to Rochester by Antoinette’s brother Daniel placed the idea that Antoinette was mad into Rochester’s mind. In this letter, Daniel tells Rochester about the history of madness in Antoinette’s family. He tells Rochester that “money is good but no money can pay for a crazy wife in your bed” (59).
The idea of women being mad is not uncommon to the societies of the past. In her essay “Women and Madness,” Shoshana Felman explains that “hysteria (significantly derived, as is well known, from the Greek word for ‘uterus’) was originally conceived as an exclusively female complaint” (7). Madness being associated with women was an idea that was conditioned into society. Wide Sargasso Sea is, in some way, about the struggle of Antoinette to overcome this social conditioning. Rochester ends up locking Antoinette in his attic in England because of the assumption that she is mad. Whether she is mad or not is hard to say. By telling part of the story through Antoinette’s point of view, Rhys makes the reader question whether any of what Antoinette tells us is the truth because she is assumed by many characters in the novel to be mad. The novel ends with what some call a dream of Antoinette’s in which she is about to burn down Rochester’s house. Antoinette does not seem to ever overcome the notion that she is inherently mad and seems to lose her identity by the end of the novel.
On the other end of the spectrum is Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Unlike Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, the main character in Alias Grace overcomes the oppression that she faces. Atwood’s novel uses an unreliable narrator in the character of Grace Marks, a woman who has been locked up in jail for her involvement in a double murder. Throughout the novel, Grace is telling her story to Dr. Samuel Jordan. By telling her story, Grace hopes to get a recommendation from Jordan to the officials of the prison telling them that Grace is not completely at fault for the murders. Grace weaves her story for Dr. Jordan with the intent of overcoming the oppression of being imprisoned.
Because Grace is telling her story with the goal of making herself look innocent, the story she tells may seem to the reader to be filled with half-truths and lies in hopes of deceiving Dr. Jordan. Grace hints at the fact that she has lied before in the final chapter of the book where she is telling Dr. Jordan about her new life. She says in reference to her forgiving her husband, Jamie Walsh, that when she forgives him she is telling a lie. She tells Jordan: “Though I suppose it isn’t the first lie I’ve told; but as Mary Whitney used to say, a little white lie such as the angels tell is a small price to pay for peace and quiet” (458). Perhaps the lies Grace speaks of in this passage are in reference to the entire story she told to Dr. Jordan in prison. Whether her story was true or not, it worked because Grace ends up being released from prison to start a new life in a new country. Like a feminist writer tries to do, Grace uses the power of words to overcome oppression and start over with a new identity and a new life.
While Rhys and Atwood use unreliable narrators to tell the novel, another technique often used by writers is symbolism. Two female writers that use symbolism in their novels are Joy Kogawa and Marie-Clarie Blais. Both Blais’ Mad Shadows and Kogawa’s Obasan use some type of symbolism to tell a story of women struggling with oppression and social conditioning. In Obasan, the character of Aunt Emily is struggling to bring a voice back to her ethnic group of Japanese-Canadians. The novel is about a Japanese-Canadian family trying to return to the life they had prior to World War II when Canadian’s of Japanese decent were removed from their homes and placed in internment camps. Aunt Emily is portrayed as the outspoken member of the family. She lives in Toronto and is constantly giving speeches and writing essays in order to bring a voice back to her culture. In many ways, Emily is the symbolic representation of a feminist writer. Ethnic writers and feminist writers have common goals because both are minorities in their respective areas.
Many feminist and ethnic writers have encouraged the members of their groups to go back and re-discover the writings that have been ignored in the past. They believe that in order to break the stereotypes of the white-male mainstream, they must look back with the goal of moving forward. In her essay “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara Christian states that: “We found that in order to move beyond prescribed categories we had to ‘rememory’ – reconstruct our past” (53). Other feminist critics like Amy Ling and Adrienne Rich have made this point as well. Aunt Emily, not unlike the feminist critics mentioned, encourages Naomi, her niece, to rediscover her past. She gives Naomi a bunch of old letters and journal entries that she wrote during the war for Naomi to read. Naomi does not understand why, but Emily tells her that she “has to remember” and that she needs to “remember everything” (60). Kogawa uses Emily to symbolize the efforts of many feminist literary scholars. Much like the writers that Emily embodies, her struggle is making progress but is far from finished. Emily does not completely overcome the oppression in Canada by the end of the novel, but the reader is led to assume that she is making progress toward doing so. Emily is aware of her identity, which is a Canadian citizen of Japanese decent, and uses her voice to make this clear.
Marie-Claire Blais also uses symbolism in her novel Mad Shadows, but unlike Obasan, the novel does not give the reader a positive ending. The novel is about a family that is crumbling to pieces. Much of the destruction of this family can be traced back to the mother, Louise. She has made some poor decisions while raising her two children. She is very vain and self-centered. In the novel, Louise comes down with some type of cancer that is visible on her cheek. The cancer that continues to grow and eat away at Louise’s face can be seen to symbolize the destruction of the family. Eventually the family falls apart and Louise dies in a fire set by her daughter, Isabelle-Marie. Right before her estate is set ablaze, Louise is looking the mirror at herself thinking that she will not die, “but her aged mouth was swimming in pus” (120). The cancer had gotten to a point where it could not be overcome. She would end up dying in flames and never overcoming the oppression of the cancer, much like her family could never overcome the oppression that Louise had brought onto her children.
Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price is similar in ending to Mad Shadows in that they both end on a sad note. However, Emecheta ends her novel using the technique of directly addressing her audience. The novel is about a young Ibuza girl named Aku-nna that is trying to break the social conditioning of her culture with the hopes of living a happy life with her husband, Chike. The cultural tradition of giving a bride price is what Aku-nna is rebelling against. Instead of staying in her village and marrying the man that has chosen her, Aku-nna runs off with her true love, Chike, to a different city so that she can live a live away from the oppression of her cultural traditions. After running away, Aku-nna has a child.
Unfortunately, she passes away after she delivers her child. Some readers may see the ending as happy because Aku-nna spends her final days away from the oppression she had faced throughout her upbringing in the Ibuza culture. However, Emecheta ends the novel with a closing paragraph that makes the reader realize that the story is anything but happy. It turns out that Aku-nna’s story is not taken as a happy love story in the African culture, but as a reinforcement of the bride price tradition. Emecheta explains how the Ibuza culture uses Aku-nna’s story in her closing paragraph: “Chike and Aku-nna substantiated the traditional superstition they had unknowingly set out to eradicate. Every girl born in Ibuza after Aku-nna’s death was told her story, to reinforce the old taboos of the land” (168). While it may seem that Aku-nna is able to break away, even if for a short time, from the social conditioning of the Ibuza culture, she is really being used as an example of why the tradition should be followed.
Another novel that leaves the reader wondering whether the ending is positive or negative is Keri Hulme’s The Bone People. Throughout this novel, the main character, Kerewin, is trying to find herself after being castaway by her family. She is oppressed by loneliness and the fact that she has lost her identity. As the story goes on, the reader learns that Kerewin has developed some type of cancer in her stomach. The tumor is visible and Kerewin has, for the most part, conceded to the fact that she is dying. She goes away from society to die by herself with no one to help her. Kerewin is just about to die when, miraculously, she is cured. The tumor in her stomach magically disappears after a mysterious figure shows up out of nowhere. This figure seems to cure Kerewin because “the thing that had blocked her gut and sucked her vitality had gone” (425). This magical and miraculous resolution to the eminent death of Kerewin leaves the reader wonder if it is real. Hulme uses the technique of magical realism to end her novel. Magical realism is a literary technique in which the events in the story are treated as real but take place in a magical haze of cultural beliefs and customs. Some readers of Hulme’s novel may interpret the scene of Kerewin’s healing to be a post-death hallucination, while others may see the end as what it is portrayed as, a happy ending and a rebirth for Kerewin. The use of magical realism leaves the readers wondering whether Kerewin overcame the disease or whether she passes over to an afterlife.
The novels that are discussed in this essay are just a small sampling of the wide variety of texts in women’s literature. This essay has compared and contrasted the techniques of a handful of women’s writers and discussed the way that some of the female characters in the novels have overcome or failed to overcome different types of oppression and social conditioning. By comparing pieces of women’s literature, a better understanding of the feminist literary tradition can be achieved. As Kolodny states in “Dancing Through The Minefield”:
“By attempting to delineate the connections and interrelations that make for a feminist literary tradition, [feminist literary scholars] provide us with invaluable aids for recognizing and understanding the unique literary traditions and sex-related contexts out of which women write” (180).
The novels discussed above show that the struggle to overcome oppression and social conditioning is a common theme in most women’s literature. The fact that the women who write these stories use different techniques and perspectives to express this struggle makes women’s literature interesting to read. Female writers have not completely overcome the oppression that they have faced in the past, but they are making progress toward doing so.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Blais, Marie-Claire. Mad Shadows. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1991.
Christian, Barbara. The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1957. 51-56.
Emecheta, Buchi. The Bride Price. New York: George Braziller, 1976.
Felman, Shoshana. Women and Madness.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991. 7-20.
Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. New York: Penguin Books USA, 1986.
Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. New York: Anchor Books, 1981.
Kolodny, Annette. Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991. 171-189.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Judith L. Raiskin. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
