A Poetics of Excess in Conrad's The Lagoon

Dr. Sreemati Mukherjee, Reader, Dept. of English, Basanti Devi College

In his excellent though brief introduction to the short story as a genre, Ian Reid isolates certain essential attributes, which however, he admits are always open to qualification and reevaluation. Reid talks about “unity of impression”, “symmetry” and “moment of crisis,” as the three most singular structural attributes of the short story as genre.[1] If we place Dominic Head's The Modernist Short Story next to Reid's we will find out that Head, has a different list of specifications which he thinks is germane to the short story as genre. According to Head, the arrival of the short story on the scene of European letters coincides with the arrival of literary Modernism (1890-1930), and the fragmentary aesthetics of many short stories corresponds to the fragmented social context of modernism, which witnessed the breakdown or rather strong interrogation of traditional Victorian verities like Honour, Family, Unity and Identity.[2] Not that these institution like notions were not questioned by Victorians like Arnold, Tennyson, Carlyle and Ruskin, however, the calamitous first world war, perhaps put the final seal to a world that had been losing its guaranteed sanctities since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.

According to Head, the short story is not to be read as the lower rung of the hierarchy with the novel, because as Pratt posits, greater length is not an index of greater richness or quality.[3] Head also emphasizes the closeness of the modern short story to the modern novel, where the moment of crisis of the short story could be seen as corresponding to the emphasis on the singular day that characterizes the structure of both Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce's Ulysses.[4] The ambiguity of meaning in the short story, Head attributes to the plural and fractured social context which artistically enables the lack of closure, and allows the “vertiginous possibilities of meaning”[5] in a short story to emerge. Regarding the politics of short story form in the 19 th century, which particularly through artists like Poe, insisted on closure, Head cites the example of Chekhov, who although, belonging to the 19 th century, admitted that his stories were all “middle”.[6]

Conrad's Lagoon , an example of his early writing, is however, formally conservative, in allowing closure through the death of a character in the story. There is also the Aristotelian “catharsis” or clarification at the end of the story, which brings both aesthetic and cognitive pleasure. The setting of the story is in “other” country—Malaysia, where many of Conrad's novels and short stories are set, a country well known to Conrad, during his many trips in the South seas. One has also to remember that the historical context that frames the story and lends significance to the “white man” also referred to as Tuan, is imperialism. As in Conrad's other novels like Lord Jim or Nostromo , imperialism is not the crying issue of The Lagoon . It is certainly at the heart of Conrad's Heart of Darkness , but even in this later novel, Conrad's condemnation of imperialism is not quite unequivocal. In Heart of Darkness , the specific darkness of imperialism seems to meld with the general darkness of the human heart, or a metaphysical darkness that incalculably and inscrutably exists within and without man. Like Dostoyevsky, Conrad interfaces the individual and the world without, to demonstrate a compelling aesthetics of evil, which brings him close to tragic poetics or aesthetics.

Is the lagoon of Conrad's story simply a physical setting or a mental state? The story enacts a fine tension between the romantic tendency towards natural description, and the dramatic or narrative need to expose the conflicts and tensions of the human heart. Much like the entry of Marlowe into the “heart of darkness” of the Belgian Congo in Heart of Darkness the “white man” of the story travels far into the interior of a Malay forest where his friend Arsat lives with a woman named Diamelen. We have noticed how tragic isolation marks the trajectory of characters like Macbeth and Lear. In The Lagoon , Arsat lives entirely isolated from any other Malay community. Arsat is an outsider, a “pariah”[7] if one likes, not because he broke with the King or the institution of monarchy, but because he betrayed the bonds of love that he shared with his brother. We must remember in this context, that like the hero in the Secret Sharer and like Lord Jim , Conrad's fiction is largely peopled by outsiders and scapegoats who have broken the law somehow.

Arsat and his brother were both warriors of a certain Malay king. Diamelen whom Arsat falls in love with, was in the service of the King's mother Inchi Midah, a powerful and ruthless woman. Arsat pined for Diamelen to an extent that his brother planned their getaway with the girl at an appointed hour. When the hour came, and the king's warriors followed the three of them through the escape route, Arsat who reached the banks of the river first, jumped into the boat with Diamelen, and ignoring his brother's appeal to wait for him, rowed away. His brother was quartered by the King's men and Arsat lived with Diamelen in the impenetrable heart of some forest, by the side of a lagoon, but with a heart made constantly heavy by his betrayal of his brother.

In this text, narrative struggles with poetry to keep a dramatic story line alive. However, the evocation of mystery, impenetrability, terror and fear through the description of the forest setting, where little is stated directly either about nature or the cosmos, but everything is implied, the reader gets a sense of the darkness that resides at the “heart” of life. The short story as a genre shares attributes of both the novel and the lyric, carrying the suggestiveness of poetry and the “action” of a story. In fact, in his brief introduction to the generic qualities of the short story, Reid indicates that the short story approximates the form of the lyric in its focus on the consummate moment..

The lyrical intensity of prose in Conrad, and the magic of its suggestive quality not only makes us gasp at the sheer beauty of its visual excellence, but also admire the luxuriance of the poetic imagination that likens such prose to poetry. Conrad pushes the limits of prose to the borderlines of poetry to such an extent that we feel like exclaiming with the urn in Ode on a Grecian Urn that “Beauty” indeed “is truth”.[8]

However, descriptions in Conrad could also veer towards the fault of the “pathetic fallacy” which Ruskin perhaps influenced by the predominance of scientific epistemologies in his age, felt blemished poetry with a lack of objectivity. For instance when Conrad speaks of the “wandering, hesitating river”( 59 ) or the “forests somber and dull”( 59 ) or “every tendril of creeper and every petal of minute blossoms seemed to have been bewitched (italics mine) into an immobility perfect and final,”(59 ) the inevitable link with human emotions and feelings is established, creating an “excess” of feeling that detracts from the supposed objectivity or referentiality of the nineteenth century “realist” mode of writing.

However, astute story teller that Conrad is, revealing in every story a sense of the inscrutability, the inevitability and the pervasiveness of evil in life, the descriptions of the forest, and the reiterative link with darkness and gloom, which while almost overshadowing the narrative at times, also advances the story or the plot by preparing the reader for the dark and terrible in life. Nature is thereby linked to the human being, creating unity of impression, which is an aesthetic demand per short story generic criteria.

Like the great tragic dramatists of the Greeks and the Elizabethan's Conrad's vision is tragic. He sees man's inevitable collusion with evil and its painful, heart-wrenching emotional consequences. Like the tragic dramatists who envisioned the human being alone and defenseless in a ruthless, malign cosmos, Conrad's stresses the human being's ultimate isolation and alienation in life/society.

The white man is the silent interlocutor in the story. Premises of race hierarchy condition the story where the white man's feelings for Arsat are described in the following manner:

He liked the man who knew how to keep faith in council and how to fight without fear by the side of his white friend. He liked him—not so much perhaps as a man likes his favourite dog—but still he liked him well enough to help and ask no questions, to think sometimes vaguely and hazily in the midst of his own pursuits, about the lonely man and the long –haired woman with audacious face and triumphant eyes, who lived together hidden by the forests—alone and feared (62)

The outcast, the pariah, is a constant trope in Conrad's fiction rooting and fuelling the narrative. If we look into Conrad's own life, the sea was doubly significant to him. Initially in helping his parents and himself to escape from Poland to England , and subsequently being the source of his livelihood. As many of his stories reveal, land, or a rooted identity is constantly problematized in his stories. In The Secret Sharer the captain of the ship suddenly discovers a castaway in his own cabin—instead of raising a hue and cry about it, he protects the young man whose fall from grace and outcast state seems to mirror his own unease with himself. The story doesn't quite explicitly state what the captain's guilt was, but the young man in the cabin, the stowaway, the “secret sharer,” or the double, makes him protect both his self (the stowaway) and the other(again, the stowaway), in a way he would have protected himself. Through allusions, suggestions, Conrad hints that there are layers of self and personality that remain unexcavated even to us, what in Freudian terms would be the relentless, ruthless, and unknowable Unconscious.

The story reaches its Aristotelian conclusion with the death of Diamelen. Retribution closes the tragic trajectory of Arsat's fate, and brings about the artistic closure of the story. Yet, like the mystery of the Urn can never be fathomed, he leaves us breathless with a kind of anxiety about the secrets of life, and the pitfalls that inevitably mark human enterprise in this world, whether material, psychological or emotional

 

 

1. Ian Reid. The Short Story . London and New York : Methuen , 1977. 54-65.

2. Dominic Head. The Modernist Short Story . 2.

3. Ibid. 3.

4. Ibid. 5.

5. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. Eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism . New York : Longman, 1989. 208.

6. Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story. 1-10.

7. Toni Morrison. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie. The word “pariah” referring to the outcast state of black people occurs in the conversation with Claudia Tate.Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. 168.

8. John Keats. Ode on a Grecian Urn. The Golden Treasury. Penguin Popular Classics. London : Penguin Popular Classics, 1994. 329.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Female Imagination: Re-Considering Austen, Bronte, Woolf and Lessing

 

The following is the text of the Paper read by Sm. Swaty Mitra at the Seminar held at Abanindra Sabhagriha, Kolkata, West Bengal, India, on 15 May, Thursday, 2008 to mark the release of the May Issue of Pegasus. The article will also be published in the next printed issue of Pegasus.

 

Swaty Mitra, Lecturer, Dept. of English, Krishnagar Government College for Women

There were two reasons for choosing this particular topic for my talk today. First, the special issue of Pegasus , being launched today, studies works by 19 th c writers and second, the present Nobel Laureate is, for the first time in the history of the Nobel, a British woman writer, Doris Lessing. However as I set down to the task I found it both daunting and expansive. Moreover there have been far too much critical discussions about these authors and I am afraid there's little that I can say that would be of any merit or present anything new. However hoping to attempt a different perspective I would, in my paper, try to understand these women writers from their non-fictional works.

I have borrowed part of my title from the title of the seminal work by Patricia Meyer Spacks - The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women's Writing . Much of my understanding has been borrowed from Ms Spacks work as it has been from those of Elaine Showalter, Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert .[1] My concentration however will be solely on the woman writer's negotiation of her femininity with her chosen vocation of becoming an artist, her medium of art, here the novel, and her difference, if any from her contemporary writers, both male and female. While writing the paper I discovered that a comparison of the writers under discussion became almost unavoidable and so I will be launching into such comparisons from time to time.

In the 18 th c England the rise of the middle-class and the circulating libraries gave birth to the professional woman writer, who wrote for money and entertained her audience with tales of heroism, horror and fantasy. As the novel was still new there were no generic prescriptions to be followed. While the novel was considered as trash by the great writers of the time, who were significantly male, the women kept catering to an increasing women-readership of the genre. It was within this social arrangement that Jane Austen wrote her novels. She wrote about a world she knew, about people she recognised and never trespassed into the unknown. It was not a lack of imagination that prevented her from moving into a gothic clime or even creating an ‘Angria” or a “Gondal” for herself, but as her advice to her niece Anna Austen Lefroy reveals, a fidelity to reality and an innate meticulousness prevented her from stepping out of the known. In her letter she writes:

… Let the Portmans (characters in Anna's novel) go to Ireland ; but as you know nothing of the manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations. Stick to Bath and the Foresters. There you will be quite at home (August 10, 1814).

In yet another letter she boasts to Cassandra about her housekeeping and says “an artist cannot do anything slovenly” (November 17, 1798). It is from such scattered references that we understand Austen's consciousness of her art. In the letter to her nephew James Edward Austen, she compares her art against the ‘manly style' of the former. With characteristic humour she writes:

…Two chapters and a half to be missing is monstrous! It is well that I have not been at Steventon lately, and therefore cannot be suspected of purloining them: two strong twigs and a half towards a nest of my own would have been something. I do not think however, that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour? (Dec. 16, 1816)

It is necessary to note her choice of words here - from a more homely description of “two strong twigs and a half” for her ‘nest' she moves on to an elaborate conceit of painting. The desire to be specific is clear. After a preliminary use of a diffused term “bit” – it is “two inches wide” in size and the medium is “ivory” and she works upon it with a “fine brush” – again suggesting the utmost care and precision that her craft employs. Virginia Woolf observes in The Common Reader :[2]

…She [Jane Austen] knew exactly what her powers were, and what material they were fitted to deal with as material should be dealt with by a writer whose standard of finality was high. There were impressions that lay outside her province; emotions that by no stretch or artifice could be properly coated and covered by her own resources.

Woof follows this observation with a note on the perceptible change in Austen's sensibility in the final novel, Persuasion . According to Woolf Austen was

…beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of Anne: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning”.

she would have known more. Her sense of security would have been shaken. Her comedy would have suffered. She would have trusted less (this is already perceptible in Persuasion ) to dialogue and more to reflection to give us a knowledge of her characters.

… She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is.

From this observation a reader might draw an impression that Austen knew little of life beyond what she depicted in her novels: the ball-rooms and the parties, the matrimonial alliances and the snobbery of the different classes. To think so is to miss the greatest mystery of Jane Austen altogether. Here was a woman, as Doris Lessing [3] points out in her essay on Austen, and the same is evident in all the letters that Jane Austen wrote to her family members, who was living through infant mortality, death at child birth, sickness, insolvency, all that could have led to grim tales of a woman's struggle. Yet she chose to portray a world that was gay and vivacious. Certainly then, her process of creation involved a process of selection. The villains and their targets were kept outside her world and rakes (like Wickham) suitably and comically find themselves matched with flighty Lydias . Yet she also refrained from presenting the absolutely virtuous. “Pictures of perfection, as you know, [she writes in her letter to her niece, Fanny Knight] make me sick and wicked; She wished not to teach how virtue is eventually rewarded. Like the narrator of Northanger Abbey,[4] she likes to leave it

… to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.

It is clear from her correspondences that she had thought long and deep about her chosen vocation, even though all her observations are pushed alongside humdrum details of everyday life. It is not just reticence but perhaps a dislike for explanation that resulted in her never writing a word of explanation. Rather she parodies the very idea in a piece of writing, titled “Plan of a Novel”,[5] where she openly laughs at the novels of her times.

…The hero would be unprincipled and heart-less young Man, desperately in love with the Heroine, and pursuing her with unrelenting passion, [clearly reminding the reader of the rakish heroes of Richardson]…. The heroine is immensely virtuous – “wherever she goes, somebody falls in love with her, and she receives repeated offers of Marriage -- which she refers wholly to her Father, exceedingly angry that he should not be first applied to”.

We also notice from Austen's letters a spirited nonchalance towards the success or prominence of her male contemporaries. She regards their success with the kind of humour that upholds her gentleness and tolerance of spirit, which according to Woolf, helped her to write with such complete dedication. In a letter to Anna Austen Lefroy, Austen writes:

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people.

I do not like him, and do not mean to like " Waverley " if I can help it, but fear I must (Sept. 28, 1814).

Such references are always short and fleeting and placed within her accounts of clothes, food, servants and news of illness or death, which needed to be communicated. If she ever wrote any letter, wholly dedicated to her art, we do not know, as most of her letters were destroyed by Cassandra Austen after her death.

What is curious about Austen as compared to the more passionate Brontes and Elliot, is her steady support of her art without any embarrassment. In her letters she openly declared her family's love for the novel. The letters also reveal how the Austen family read and enjoyed and commented upon each other's works. In Northanger Abbey she supports the novel explicitly against the age's censorious rejection of it:

there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader -- I seldom look into novels … Such is the common cant. -- "And what are you reading, Miss --?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it' (Chapter 5, p.2).

Austen here does not only support the novel, but shows a sisterly loyalty towards the women writers of her time – Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth – by referring to their works. She also criticises boldly the affected style of the 18 th C prose writers. In her unfinished work (Sanditon), she criticises Richardson and his school of writers. She introduces in the novel a very foolish Richardsonian character (Sir Edward Denham) and makes him criticize novels like those she herself writes as "vapid tissues of Ordinary occurrences from which no useful Deductions can be drawn" .[6]

Little do her critics realise how skilfully Austen secures through these “ordinary occurrences” a power for the woman writer that had been absent from their writing. It is the power of the “gaze” [Laura Mulvey uses the term to explain the male objectification of the feminine figure] and Austen projects in her novel the feminine gaze that subjects the male character to a “looked-at-ness” .[7] The opening of Pride and Prejudice [8] should confirm this observation:

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters (Chapter I, p. 1).

There are two things that this extremely famous opening does to the man in question – it reduces the man to an anonymity, as it is not till the very end of the page that we know his name to be a certain Mr Bingley and at the same time it objectifies the man, reducing him to a “property” to be had. Right through the novel the men remain figures who are “looked-at”. In the male tradition it is the woman who had been subjected to the gaze and have been the object to be looked-at. Here Austen reverses the pattern.

Let us consider this passage and note the use of the word ‘look' in its various form:

Mr. Bingley was good looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant countenance, and easy, unaffected manners. His brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, merely looked the gentleman; but his friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend (Chapter 3, p.1).

One may argue that in spite of this reversal the women continue to be subjected to the male gaze in the novels, and which they are, but with a difference. Austen records the purely feminine response of the woman, subjected to the male gaze. Thus when Darcy rejects Bingley's proposal that he dance with Elizabeth :

… turning round, he looked for a moment at Elizabeth , till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, ``She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.''

Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings towards him. She told the story however with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous (Chapter 3, p.2).

Although Darcy's behaviour is purposely uncivil the act of “catching her eye” gives Elizabeth an acknowledgement that is denied to Darcy himself when he is looked at and discussed by the women in the party.

All through her letters we find Austen delighting in discerning and comprehending the male gaze. She writes delightfully to Cassandra about the attention she has received from the various men in the dances, or the attention that a cap or a gown has drawn from the ladies present. In Austen's awareness of her own physical appeal, or the lack of it as the case may be, one may read the initial signs of the woman artist's awareness of her sexuality – a matter that becomes more complex in the later half of the century in the works of the Bronte sisters and George Elliot.

Where Jane Austen was conscious and careful to note the age's indifference towards her art and skilfully dealt with the situation by employing the tools of wit and satire, usurped from the supposedly superior male tradition, Charlotte Bronte or George Elliot felt a hesitation to expose their feminity. Where Austen dared to laugh at the misogynistic representation of the woman by a Swift or a Scott, and still procured an obituary from the Gentleman's Magazine, [9] Bronte and Elliot, disguised their art under male pseudonyms to evade attacks on their person or their art. It is also interesting to note how each of them responded to Jane Austen or the novels of her period.

Charlotte Bronte's[10] initial response to Jane Austen is a vehement rejection – “Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant.'' In yet another letter written to George Lewes who championed Austen's works over Waverly , she writes with a greater understanding of the art of her predecessor:

``With infinitely more relish can I sympathise with Miss Austen's clear common sense and subtle shrewdness. If you find no inspiration in Miss Austen's page, neither do you find mere windy wordiness; to use your words over again, she exquisitely adapts her means to her end; both are very subdued, a little contracted, but never absurd.''

To consider a similarity between Austen and Bronte we notice in Jane Eyre [11] a similar objectification of the male figure through the woman's gaze. Unaware of Rochester 's identity Jane watched him:

Something of daylight still lingered, and the moon was waxing bright: I could see him plainly. His figure was enveloped in a riding cloak, fur collared and steel clasped; its details were not apparent, but I traced the general points of middle height and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked. I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic (Chapter 12, pp. 3-4).

By employing the female gaze as a means of describing the male character the writer makes him an object of feminine fancy and desire. It is no wonder then that the Darcys, Heathcliffs and Rochesters have inspired the female reader almost in the same way the Helens, Cleopatras and Beatrices had inspired their male counterparts over many centuries. In her poem, titled The Letter, [12] we find Bronte resorting again to a similar objectification of the male subject, who in the end is revealed to be the lamenting woman's husband. The lines go such:

Yet, o'er the piles of porcelain rare,

O'er flower-stand, couch, and vase,

Sloped, as if leaning on the air,

One picture meets the gaze.

'Tis there she turns; you may not see

Distinct, what form defines

The clouded mass of mystery

Yon broad gold frame confines.

But look again; inured to shade

Your eyes now faintly trace

A stalwart form, a massive head,

A firm, determined face.

Black Spanish locks, a sunburnt cheek

A brow high, broad, and white,

Where every furrow seems to speak

Of mind and moral might.Is that her god?

I cannot tell; Her eye a moment met

Th' impending picture, then it fell

Darkened and dimmed and wet.

However, Bronte suffers from anxiousness towards propriety which is not quite discernible in Austen. It is perhaps this anxiety that prompted her, to write her Preface to Jane Eyre's Second Edition. In the said Preface she addresses those

timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as "Jane Eyre:" in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry--that parent of crime--an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

It is difficult to imagine Austen writing anything vaguely similar to such an impassioned support of her work. In this Preface we find a self-centredness which we may notice marks almost all Bronte heroines. Woolf has observed

all her force, and it is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, "I love", "I hate", "I suffer".

For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate.[13]

On reading this passage we are reminded of Bronte's immature and may I say impulsive rejection of Jane Austen. Bronte had wrote in her letter to Lewes:

Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written Pride and Prejudice or Tom Jones, than any of the Waverley novels?

I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I had read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped [photographed] portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck [stream]. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will probably irritate you. but I shall run the risk.

Again, is not such a passage a case of an “anxiety of influence”? A desperate effort to break away from a powerful predecessor? Jane Austen suffered no such anxiety, she was by far the greatest woman writer that England had seen till then, and she perhaps knew it. Moreover her thrust was to write alongside the male tradition and make her mark. So she could laugh as heartily at the novels by women writers as she laughed at the Richardsonian variety. Charlotte Bronte heavily influenced by the Romantic movement, felt any comparison as a detriment, a criticism of her unique experience. Also with the novel having gained some amount of respectability she was writing against a patriarchal canon then headed by the immensely popular Walter Scott and William Thackeray. For Bronte to accept the greatness of Jane Austen was therefore a double impediment as it meant she had to accept the legacy of both a male and a fledgling female tradition. The use of her pseudonym Curer Bell, shows her desire to be freed from the female tradition, from the prejudices that it was constantly subjected to, and be acknowledged by the male readership. She wrote:

Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because -- without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called 'feminine' -- we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise." [BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF ELLIS AND ACTON BELL", from the preface to the 1910 edition of Wuthering Heights .] [14]

Where Jane Austen is happy or excited by any response to her work, Charlotte Bronte seeks acceptance from the male reader whether it be George Lewes, or the unnamed male critics, mentioned in the Preface , who had “encouraged [her] as only large-hearted and high-minded men know how to encourage a struggling stranger”(Preface).

Here one may notice a similarity between Charlotte Bronte and George Elliot. Elliot too shows a similar desire to be recognised by a male audience. In her essay How I Came to Write Fiction [15] Elliot narrates how she was encouraged by George Lewes to write a novel. Elliot writes –

He used to say, ‘You have wit, description and philosophy – those go a good way towards the production of a novel” (p. 323)

And again,

…when I read him the early part of ‘Amos', he had no longer any doubt about my ability to carry out the plan.

Amos Barton was serially published in the Blackwood Magazine in 1857. Elliot mentions that Blackwood had sent her ‘word' -

“the men at the club seem to have mingled their tears and their tumblers together. It would be curious if you should be a member and be hearing your own praises!” There was clearly no suspicion that I was a woman (324).

Elliot continues to mention the reviews received for her first work, but significantly, she only mentions the male readers – as if no woman read her work. Such a partisan view of her art should have disturbed her as an artist. Yet we find little more than contentment in the essay. Did George Elliot/Mary Ann Evans feel that women who read the “Silly Novels” which she had reviewed with righteous censor in one of her essays, were not capable of appreciating her novel?

Both Bronte and Elliot, then, placed the woman writer on slippery grounds. The self-consciousness of the art and self-fashioning of the woman artist which Austen develops in her writing, could have become much stronger in the works of Bronte and Elliot. The nets that society throw upon an artist's sensibility might have been recorded much before Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man , and the history of English society and literature might have been different if these writers had overcome their fear of the male censor. However they did not and thus allowed their successors to bear the legacy of their fear of the gaze of the male-critic and relate to the figures of femininity as “angels in the house” or the “fallen woman” as the “eternal feminine” (a phrase used and vehemently rejected by Simonne de Beauvoir). Woolf in a paper read to the Women's Service League in 1931, Profession for Women , observes how this fictitious creation of the Victorian age has to be killed for any woman to write. For the ‘Angel', writes Woolf, would “come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews”

For, as I found … you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must--to put it bluntly--tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe;

Woolf goes on to say that it is not enough to have a room of one's own. The woman writer must jump over the second impediment and overlook the question “what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions”. For to consider such a question would surely “rouse her from her artist's state of unconsciousness”. Woolf stresses on the need to express the experience and fantasies of a woman sincerely and truthfully. In A Room of One's Own [16] Woolf compares the flawed women's novels to “pock-marked apples in an orchard”. “It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others” (p.71). Woolf credits Jane Austen and Emily Bronte for being able “to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking”. Earlier in the same chapter Woolf places Austen alongside Shaskespeare for “writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching”. Yet a little before, in the same paragraph, Woolf opines that “to Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice ”, hence she hid it from visitors (p.65). In these obviously contradictory observations I note the limitations or confusions of Woolf's own ideas about the artistic process. For a writer who sees the necessity of having “a room of one's own” and economic independence to write, Woolf fails to see in Austen's jealous protection of her work the artist's careful nurturing of the work of art. It is unlikely that Jane Austen who never resorted to pseudonyms and who so openly supported the novel, as an art form, would have considered the art of writing as discreditable. Is it not possible that she might have taken the precaution to prevent any unwanted question or suggestion, well meaning or otherwise, from her visitor(s) which politeness would not have allowed her to avoid? With her family she was certain of no such unwanted attention and felt comfortable writing amidst the din of the living room. I am tempted to observe further that when Woolf wrote the word ‘discreditable' she was being guided by ‘the angel'.

Again in Chapter 6 of the book as Woolf muses upon the artist's mind being “androgynous” we note a contradiction. Woolf sketches a “plan of the soul” and assigns two powers one male, one female to it. She writes:

The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties (93).

In the very next paragraph she observes:

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous (emphasis added); that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. (93)

If we observe clearly there's a confusion here. Which then is the “androgynous mind”? The one which is described as a fusion of the male and female parts of the mind, or the mind that is “incandescent and undivided”? The latter is clearly more Coleridgean as it is marked by the notion of organic wholeness, while the former shows a more modern/ modernist tendency to forge a unification of two essentially different elements.

In the final passages of the book Woolf upholds Shakespeare's unborn, unnamed sister as the ultimate female artist, who would be born, through the travails and works of all the women writers who would precede her (108). Here again is a fallacy – if we assume that Shakespeare's sister would be born as an androgynous writer then why must only the work of women writers pave her ground? Why must she be Shakespeare's sister and not someone with a name and fame of her own? Possibly once again Woolf was guided by ‘the angel' who had whispered in her ear that no woman writer should be allowed to be greater than the great Shakespeare. Elaine Showalter observes in A Literature of their Own:

But whatever the abstract merits of androgyny, the world that Virginia Woolf inhabited was the last place in which a woman could fully express both femaleness and maleness, nurturance and aggression. For all her immense gift, Virginia Woolf was as thwarted and pulled asunder as the women she describes in A Room of Ones' Own . Androgyny was the myth that helped her evade confrontation with her own painful femaleness and enabled her to choke and repress her anger and ambition. Woolf inherited a female tradition a century old; no woman writer has ever been more in touch with--even obsessed by--this tradition than she; yet by the end of her life she had gone back full circle, back to the melancholy, guilt-ridden, suicidal women--Lady Winchelsea and the Duchess of Newcastle--whom she had studied and pitied. And beyond the tragedy of her personal life is the betrayal of her literary genius, her adoption of a female aesthetic that ultimately proved inadequate to her purposes and stifling to her development.[17]

The period after Woolf, especially after the Great Wars, the gradual decolonisation of the erstwhile European colonies in Africa and Asia and the woman's greatly altered position in the new world order gave rise to a new phase in woman's literature that was almost inconceivable to the writers of the 19 th C. The age saw the flowering of some of the greatest women writers, such as, Iris Murdoch, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood. Toni Morrison and almost as an incarnate of Woolf's description of the woman writer who has to write for money and spend that “sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher's bills”, Doris Lessing arrived on the shores of England with the manuscript of her first novel and her 5 year old son in 1949. She was formed by the literature of 19 th c England , France , Russia . As a Communist she was tutored under the Marxist School to adhere to realism in art. As a colonial settler she had an imaginary homeland in England and a physical homeland in Africa . As a woman writer she was under the compulsion to write about women's concern and found her novels being appropriated by the feminists. As a Communist she felt the disillusionment of the Stalinist era and lived through the Cold War, the marches for Nuclear Disarmament, the 60s, the Thatcher rule of the 80s, and witnessed the transformation of a verbal culture into a visual culture with the advent of television, which subsequently changed into a virtual age. As a single, free-woman first in Johannesburg and then in London she experienced sexual freedom and found herself in relationships that were damaging or gratifying. As a mother and later housemother to a number of children during the sixties she fed, nursed and looked after children and for the last sixty years she has been writing novels, essays, reviews, plays, poetry, autobiography, sketches. No Woolf can criticise her lack of experience, rather she has some experiences which Woolf could never have had.

It is almost frightening to wonder what would frame the imagination of such a writer. It is perhaps more interesting to note how this writer has subsumed within her the traditions that have created her. Let us compare her to Jane Austen. Apparently Austen and Lessing lived in completely different ages and we may wonder how they could have shared anything vaguely similar? Yet the life of young Lessing in her father's farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) moved around the same concerns of attending parties, buying dresses, marriages and alliances between families, births and deaths, the servants, the farm, the classes and money. In Under My Skin and in Martha Quest Lessing gives a vivid account of this life. In Lessing one may discover a penchant for irony and parody as one would find in Austen, but minus the gaiety and lightheartedness of the latter. There's grimness, a bitterness, which evolved into passivity in Lessing which she had inherited from her parents (both victims of the First World War). Again as in Bronte we notice anger in Lessing's autobiographical heroine, Martha Quest, but the anger of young Martha may be akin to Jane Eyre's rage but it is much more coherent. It is not the spitting/hissing of a locked up Jane-Bertha, but a clear revolt against parental, especially maternal dominance over one's self – soul and body. In an interview with Eve Bertelsen Lessing says that everything went wrong with their mother after they left Persia “including her daughter who was a perpetual misery!” [18] Elsewhere she says that it was more from a sense of revolt that she joined the Communists and also because it is with the Communists in South Africa that she could share and discuss books. Her involvement with the Communist movement had a positive effect on Lessing it helped channellize the anger that she felt against the racist nature of her own community. As I had pointed out earlier the anger in Lessing is different from that in Bronte – it is driven as much outwards as it is inwards for being a white, a superior. Her anger spilled out in the first few books and then filtered into a vision of a world that is essentially divided, of the individual as one who is severed by multiple realities, of the artist as committed to note the reality of life. It is with this tempered anger that Lessing writes her most celebrated work The Golden Notebook .

This book marked the ailment – the problem of reception – that has continued to plague Lessing's works. It is the same problem that have threatened women writers down the ages - the problem of the artist's purpose being misunderstood, of the artistic vision being miscomprehended. In her Preface to The Golden Notebook Lessing explains how the book was shaped to make ”its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped”. However the book was appropriated by the Feminist Movement as its bible, claiming that it was about the sex-war which, Lessing points out, went against the very essence of the book that “says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalise”. She also points out that it was her attempt to write a great 19 th c novel like those written by the great French and Russian writers, which the English tradition had not seen. That she was filtering it through the consciousness of a woman was inconsequential as she felt that a woman's way of looking at life has the same validity as the man's way.

Here we may be tempted to bring a comparison with Woolf's theory of the androgynous mind and I hope that in such a comparison we may note that Lessing does not say that the woman's and the man's way are one and the same but that they must have the same validity. No ‘angel' stops her from writing that line. In The Golden Notebook Lessing makes an ironic acknowledgement of Woolf as a preceding artist by naming her protagonist, an artist with a writer's block, Anna Wulf. Yet it is clear that her artistic imagination is far different from that of Woolf, Joyce or perhaps any of the great moderns. Her stated purpose in The Golden Notebook was to transform the artist who had become “monstrously isolated, monstrously narcissistic, pedestalled paragon” and make him/her realise that “nothing is personal in the sense that it's uniquely one's own”. “Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares”, writes Lessing and thus marks the coming of age of the woman writer. There's no desire to be Shakespeare's or anyone's sister for that matter, but a more clear desire to allow life to filter through one's consciousness into different artistic shapes. Lessing's oeuvre is marked by a multiplicity of forms and one notices that post The Golden Notebook and the final two volumes of the Children of Violence (Martha Quest quintet) her novels became decreasingly a writing to discover her true self and more about the larger issues of the world. Every time she delved into new matters like old age, mental disintegration, or even the apocalypse, we find her changing her forms from inner-space fiction using Free Indirect Discourse for narration to Space fiction, where she arranges the narrative in reports, journals accounts, notebooks. By choosing such varied narrative media she has constantly evaded classification. Her critics have pursued her with labels, and have found them inadequate for one with such an imagination.

To sum up Lessing, as I read her, succeeded in writing several books which might match up to a Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Proust because she has not been limited by any war within or without. She has given an account of the zeitgeist and have placed her men and women amidst it. Like Austen she has shown an aversion for perfect characters, yet her characters are far from those of Austen. Her heroines, unlike heroines of most novels by women, rarely inspire readers to a romantic identification, even though the reader recognises personal similarities. Her heroes are rarely attractive like Darcy, Heathcliff or Rochester or even a Stephen Dedalus, but rarely will we find the thoughts and emotions of the male characters being dealt with such sympathy in a novel written by a woman.

I am afraid my study has been quite limp in comparison to the fascinating discussions and dissertations that range over the issues of being a woman and a woman artist. I do not think I am competent in anyway to involve the huge mass of feminist and psychoanalytic discourses that are usually employed in the study of the woman's literature. This has been more of a personal exploration of some of the British authors with whom I am closely or vaguely familiar. All of them happened to be women, single, and daring, and who chose the novel as their medium of expression.

 

1. See Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing , Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1977; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination” in The Madwoman in the Attic , Yale university Press, 1979, pp. 27-36.

2. See Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader , First Series, Chapter 12, http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/chapter12.html

3. See Doris Lessing, “Jane Austen” printed. in Time Bites , pp 2-3.

4. I have consulted e-books for this paper. See Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey , Chapter31, p.2, http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/6/10/frameset.html

5. Written in 1816, partly as a result of her encounter with Mr. Clarke, Jane Austen returns here to her earlier habit (in the Juvenilia and Northanger Abbey) of parodying what was ridiculous in the popular literature of her day -- in this case perfectly virtuous heroines (she confessed in one of her letters that "pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked"), villainous aristocratic would-be ravishers, and high toned literary sentiments and vehement emotions instead of a natural depiction of real life. The Plan of a Novel also incorporates some of the would-be helpful "advice" that most authors can't help receiving from family, friends, and strangers (the original manuscript includes marginal notes indicating those who were responsible for certain suggestions). See of the Plan of a Novel , http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/plannovl.html

6. See Jane Austen, Sanditon , Chapter 7 & 8, http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/sndedwdn.html

7. See Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/ctcs505/mulveyVisualPleasureNarrativeCinema.pdf ( Originally Published - Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18)

8. See Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice , Chapter I, p.1, http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/6/10/frameset.html

9. See http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/jausobit.gif

10. See Charlotte Bronte's correspondences with George Lewes @ http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/janeart.html#austart3

11. See Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre , http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/6/10/frameset.html

12. See Charlotte Bronte, “The Letter” in http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/the_letter.html

13. See Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader , http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/chapter14.html

14. See http://mick-armitage.staff.shef.ac.uk/anne/biognotc.html

15. See, George Eliot, Selected Critical Writings , edtd. Rosemary Ashton, Oxford , New York : OUP, 1992

16. All references to this book from Virginia Woolf, A room of One's Own , New Delhi … London : UBS Publishers' Distributors Ltd.

17. See Showalter, op. cit http://ecmd.nju.edu.cn/UploadFile/17/8084/theirown.doc

18. See Interview with Eve Bertelsen in Earl G. Ingersoll ed. Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing , 1964-94 , ( London : Flamingo), 1996.

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