Sexual Difference in a Different Religiosity: Writing the Nation in "My Life"

Section I: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Texts

How to figure the question of sexual difference in historiography of texts? This essay tries to address the question of sexual difference in the production of the male aesthetic of literature, going beyond an enumeration of women's contributions. Reading a "woman's text" closely, I find some elements of a figuration of space-time and a figuration of religiosity both different from and intimately related to, respectively, the chronotope of the nation and the patriarchal religious. The difference lies, to put it in a formulaic manner, in enunciations of relating the body to the (real and ideational) space that one inhabits and in a displacement of a certain mode of devotion from the man to the woman. To act out this reading, the paper has to interrogate some prevalent ways of looking at the nation and at the religious. To begin, a set of questions has to be addressed. The first is that of the specificity of a woman's enunciations in literature (even if we hold on to genre divisions). What are the specific elements that such enunciations provide, elements that are absent in that of the "man"? The second is the (almost unaddressed) question of the unacknowledged sexism in aesthetics that underlies the notions of a "good poet" or a "good author." What are the parameters of poetry that can only mark men poets as "good"? Do women poets have the potential to expand or modify the notions of beauty, poetry, or literature? Do generalities of poetic beauty have universal validity? Are there other generalities? The third question is, how to read texts in a literary way, while being aware of the distinctions and specificities of genre, disciplines, or typologies? In this paper, I try to retain a sensitivity to these questions while striving to formulate a more or less coherent account of an autobiography written by a woman in nineteenth-century Bengal in the context of the nation that is known to her as Bharatbarsha. But is it a nation that she knows by that name? The question might very well, despite being addressed in my writing, hang in perpetual irresolution.

Susie Tharu and K. Lalita had been addressing similar concerns in 1991 in their introduction to the collection of writings that has since been canonical, the two volumes of Women Writing in India. That introduction deals in detail with the contemporary Anglo-American traditions in feminist critical theory. Outlining, following Elaine Showalter, the two principal strands of feminist theorizing on the issue as "feminist critique" and "gynocritics," it goes on to mark the implicit commonness of the two modes. Whereas the former strand focuses on the patriarchal underpinnings of the dominant male literary productions, the latter is in search of a "distinctively female literary tradition" (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, quoted in Tharu and Lalita 1991, 19). Tharu and Lalita, while affirming the importance of these feminist efforts in no uncertain terms, raise vital issues to point at their limitations. These limitations, as the essay moves on to show, flow from the inherent and unacknowledged circumscription of these writings by the very history of the middle-class white Western concerns of their production. The essay delineates four elements that make up the conceptual grid of these feminist criticisms: 1) The idea of a loss that calls for a recovery assumes the parameters of dominant Western middle-class aesthetics instead of trying to displace them. 2) The idea of a release or escape in a feminist poetics accompanies the theme of loss. This idea in its turn echoes a Rousseauist call for the individual in the enlightenment paradigm that has been patriarchal and blind to class and race differences. 3) A feminist poetics of this variety draws on the authenticity of the "experience" of women. To treat experience in this manner is to blunt the political edge in the act of positing the experience of women to challenge and recast dominant modes of understanding. A naturalizing of the immediacy and spontaneity of women's responses blinds one...