From political power positions to social media and brand endorsements, Feminists have been asking for representation of women: fair, unabridged and unfiltered representation showing who they really are. They ask for something that is as real and human as can be, portraying women to be a resultant of their hard work, their ideals of morality and values along with the ones imposed on them by the society they live in, the way they shape their lives around their responsibilities and how they work around them and do or don’t achieve something they want.
Like anyone, women too are the product of strings of morality and what is expected of them. Their experiences differ from because of the lottery of birth: differing in their exposures in terms of region, religion, access to opportunities and privilege and the subsequent actions of their parents and kin.
This will be a series into what shapes and constitutes the representation of women in literature, modern and earlier.
Literature by Men
In one of her most famous works, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf digs deep and at length, fleshes out all that makes up the mind of a female writer, or the reasons that hold her back from writing. It explores the history of the fertile literary period of the early 20th century and earlier and why women have not taken to writing as much as men have, and of the women that have - why their areas of interest differ from men.
She talks about the number of men who write so much about women, save the only qualification of being a man, they go on and on - making assumptions, drawing conclusions and making decisions and inferences with little to no information about the real woman. Woolf asks,
“What could be the reason for this curious disparity, I wondered...Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
This disparity is the gulf between the number of books written by men and women and the topics they choose to write about.
In the literary world, women are fantasies of men. They have always been a figment of their imagination. Someone or something they could fantasise about to enthral and delight themselves yet not bother with the realities of. This transcends into modern media as well, with the roles women play in mainstream television and movie roles. Because the narrative has been skewed such to appease and appeal to the male gaze, women have been portrayed to further manifest this idea. Feminist and social rights activist, bell hooks says that for the modern women to enjoy mass entertainment media, they have to either forget completely or ignore the negation of women. Many black women she spoke to agreed that they had to shut off critique of their portrayals, especially ones concerned with racism and sexism.
The idea has always been to be to entertain, and seldom to tell stories. Speaking of Leo Tolstoy and one of his greatest works ‘War and Peace’, Woolf says that the criticism for seemingly feminine pieces remains trivial and further undermines the depth of the book that speaks of it. The book critic takes a different eye, conjecturing that:
”This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.”
Women must have wanted to write about men too, maybe with even the same trail of thought as picked up by men. There have been great classics, like ‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Bronte to name one. But perhaps it was their patriarchal purview and more so because they thought of things beyond men - that they chose not to.
What held women back to write, then?
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