Jill Petersen
LITR 5734 2001
Final Exam

Contact Between Women and the Outside World: a Look at Culture Contact and the Status of Women.

Women have generally been a protected commodity to be kept apart from the outside world. How much contact did both colonizer and colonized women have with cultures outside of their own? What influence does this “protection” of women have on their social status and power within their respective cultures? This idea of women’s contact with other cultures can be seen in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Forster’s Passage to India, and Roy’s The God of Small Things.

Both Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart take place in the early stages of colonization. Women are kept separate from the other culture. In Heart of Darkness, this is a deliberate action taken to protect the women. In telling his story, Marlow mentions a girl, Kurtz’s intended. He later berates himself for mentioning her saying, “Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it -- completely. They -- the women I mean -- should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse” (125). This is indicative of the place that women inhabit in the power and status structure of the English patriarchy. The women should be kept out of politics both for their own sakes and the sake of the men who keep them imprisoned in that role of lesser. What would happen in this novel if women were allowed contact with the African culture, the author does not say, but he does say that they should be kept out of it. In this regard the position of women in their lack of contact with outside cultures is deliberate. And, as we who have the benefit of history know, it has taken decades of fighting to be allowed the same chances as men, not that the chance for opportunity is the same as equality.

In Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, women again do not come into significant contact with the colonizers. This, unlike Heart of Darkness does not seem to be a deliberate, thought-out action, but rather a by-product of women’s standing within the tribal power structure. Women are not a part of the counsel of elders or the title system; thus they are not a part of the delegation who deal with the colonizers force. They are not the ones who benefit from the education and training that the colonizers later provide in order to profit further from their rule over the African tribes. The colonizers deliberately leave out the women in their literacy drive. Men and young boys are allowed to go to school but the women and young girls are not. Men are taught to cultivate cash crops leaving the women to cultivate the food that the tribe will eat, leaving them no economic status, whereas, prior to the colonizers’ meddling the women were allowed to sell their excess food for profit, giving them some financial independence. (See research paper)

The only contact women in Things Fall Apart have with the British colonizers is with the missionaries and the solders who come to slaughter the people of Abame. In order to keep the peace with their husbands, the women have little to do with the missionaries, whose converts come mainly from the efulefu, the worthless men who no one would miss. Thus contact with the missionaries gave the women no status and only served to have their movements further curtailed. As for contact with the soldiers, there was definitely no benefit to the women from that contact, they were all murdered. Within the novel women have very little contact with the world outside of their tribes. Looking at history beyond the scope of the novel, this lack of contact severely hindered the women and their power within the tribe. As the men became more westernized the women became more dependent on the men leading to reduced status and power for the women.

Thus the two “African” novels depict the women as needed to be protected from the outside world. The British deliberately isolated their women, to protect the “beautiful world” in which the women live, and the Ibo tribesmen isolated their women not quite so deliberately but because of the approach the British colonizers chose to take to establish their control. The Ibo were not as deliberate as the British in their isolation and further debilitating of “their” women in the sense of power and equality but the effect is the same: women must later work all the hard to overcome the inequalities in education, power, and status.

In Forster’s Passage to India and Roy’s God of Small Things, women have much more contact with the opposite culture than the women in the African novels, this does not mean that the contact is beneficial to their power and status within their respective cultures. In Passage to India, the Indian ladies do not have much contact with their British counterparts. This is seen through the scene at the bridge party when Miss Quested said to an interpreter, “Please tell these ladies that I wish we could speak their language...” and when on of the ladies replies in English that they do speak English, Mrs. Turton said, “Why, fancy, she understands” (42). The British wives have come into contact and have the option of beginning a dialogue with the Indian ladies but choose not to believe that such relations would be beneficial. The British women believe that they are superior to all but one or two of the Ranis and that those are on an equal basis (42). Why would the British women feel that they are so far superior to the ladies of the Purdah? Perhaps they feel that they have so little power over their own lives that they have to subjugate someone to give them more status. However, this belief further limits the power that the women could have gained by becoming more familiar with the world in which they live. The attitude of the British women further limit the Indian women and strip them of their power within their own culture. The two exceptions to the British attitudes are Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore and they are more concerned with the appearance of India than the actual workings and people that live there. Miss Quested becomes the center of attention when she exercises her power over the Indian men by accusing Dr. Aziz of wrongful approaches, then when she tells the truth she loses all status in the eyes of the British, but for a time gains some prestige, though not nearly as much as Mrs. Moore, in the Indian community. If the women had not allowed their differences to affect their relationships they could have changed the entire face of colonization.

In The God of Small Things, women are no longer confined to the Purdah but they are also not permitted to take positions traditionally held by men. Mammachi is an interesting study. She submits to blows by her husband yet she is a strong enough businesswoman to keep her pickle company afloat by running it like she would her kitchen. When Chacko returns she allows him to take over her business and he promptly runs it into the ground. She dotes on Chacko, who does not seem to be able to get anything right, and yet she mistreats Ammu who could have helped Mammachi in the business and running of the house. Ammu does what she can to get out from under her parents’ roof, which is what they want, yet they look down on her for her choice of husband and feel vindicated when she gets divorced. Western ideologies have changed the laws under which women and the untouchables function yet discrimination occurs because of the traditional views of the proper position of these two groups. Untouchables are put in the same category as women in that they are not allowed the same privileges as touchable men. They are not allowed the same jobs, they are not allowed the same rights, and they are not allowed the same privileges. This is what women have been facing for centuries. It is worth noting that communism, a Western ideal, is the cause of Velutha’s death and, indirectly, Ammu’s death as well. It is for the sake of the communist party that Comrade Pillai betrays Velutha and Velutha’s destruction that destroys Ammu. While Westernized thought leads Chacko to stop Pappachi from further beating Mammachi, Chacko’s traditional views lead him to force Mammachi out of her own business. In this novel, Western thought and traditional views come into conflict with each other practically every other page. It is this conflict that leads to the downfall of the characters, especially the women. Baby Kochama begins her downward spiral when she leaves her family to join a convent to be close to a priest. Ammu loses her status by divorcing her husband, an unheard of action before Western influence, however, by divorcing her husband she frees herself from his drunkenness and willingness to sell her to the White overseer. Mammachi is saved from beatings by her son’s Westernized ideas but he later takes away her economic influence by taking away her business. Rahel and Estha’s world is turned upside down by the death of their British cousin. This novel is a display of the clash between the ideals of the colonizer with the beliefs in tradition and shows the struggle of women to gain a position of autonomy in their own culture.

In both “Indian” novels the women of both cultures come into contact with each other which leads to confusion as to which system of thought they wish to follow. Forster’s novel shows the British belief in their superiority over the conquered people. The British women hold the most extreme contempt for the culture they are suppressing, thus holding themselves prisoners in the miniature world they created. In Roy’s novel, the Indian women struggle to make a place for themselves in the world where the British and their own men have abandoned them . Where do they belong?

In all four of these novels, the women are put in a position of disenfranchisement. They can no longer rely completely on the traditional position they held but yet they are not allowed to fully enter the Westernized world they have been shown. Thus, no matter what contact they had with their colonizers, they are behind the men in rights and power and thus have been done a great disservice by the colonizers and their own men.

Dear Jill,

More organization, especially in the introduction, would have helped the development of several of your points. But this reader hung on and found real rewards. You never seem quite to state the thesis that, at least as far as you examine, women may have benefited more from supposedly sexist traditional cultures than from the supposedly liberating colonial cultures. Especially when you reach God of Small Things, however, your proofs for this idea become quite striking. I think I may have been inclined to note the traditional culture’s failure to equip them for the changes they face, but you effectively create the impression that these changes would not have occurred but for colonization—and, above all, that that these changes always work against the interests of women. Though you’re probably not the first to state this position, you offer an important contribution to the postcolonial studies, as the disciplines of cultural and gender studies often reach contradictory conclusions. (To wit, colonialism was bad for wrecking indigenous cultures, but those indigenous cultures were bad for their treatment of women. I myself, trained in the traditions of southern chivalry, am like many other western observers disposed to think that traditional cultures treat their women badly because those cultures lack chivalric traditions. All so self-congratulatory!)

Your high-intensity summer has worked to your benefit. You’ve successfully carried over insights and terms of discussion from your women’s studies course—and, who knows, maybe the Women’s Studies course has absorbed a bit of postcolonialism.

Just to explain a little further the problems I cite with the organization of your essay, you require your reader to do a bit too much of the heavy lifting, especially in terms of linking your main points into an overall resolution. The greatest danger of this is that your reader, though satisfied with the conclusions he’s reached based on your exposition of material, can’t be absolutely sure that the points he’s arrived at are the points you meant for him to arrive at. But I certainly give you credit for describing and analyzing the texts usefully and provocatively.