Paula Tyler

A Gendered Power Struggle

More often than not, fiction is used to describe historical events. Even if the fiction itself is not history, one must understand history in order to relate to the fictional story. The problem arises however, when only one side of the story is told. This is the case, also more often times than not, in colonial literature. Not only is this the case with the colonized and the colonizer, or the oppressor and oppressed, but one often finds the woman’s voice left out as well. Can fiction actually capture the historical relevance of those who experienced it? In the novels, Train to Pakistan, Jasmine, Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness, women are left voiceless to reveal the subservient role through oppression and learned ignorance hidden under the guise of protection.  

In Train to Pakistan, the few women who are discussed are mostly revealed during times of heartache and pain, but the reader never really gets an inside glimpse into how the events affect the woman emotionally. In her final exam, Karen Daniel touches on the women who suffer great loss and pain, but were helpless to stopping it. There is not a strong female presence anywhere in the novel and women are proven utterly defenseless to the atrocities occurring around them. This is show most evidently in the character, Sundari. She is forced to watch her new husband castrated, is then handed his penis, and is forcibly raped by the mob. The raping and prostitution of so many women in the novel is not about sex, but instead, about power and subordination. Women know their place and it is never revealed if any one of them questions that. Young girls are used as prostitutes, especially in the case with the magistrate, while older women watch and condone the experience. The young girls eventually become hardened to the life of prostitution and are forced to reclaim some identity that was taken away from them during patrician, whether it is negative or positive.

Quite the opposite of Train to Pakistan, in Jasmine, the main character is a female in which and entire life story is given, but similarly to the previous novel, she also does not have a place in life that she creates for herself. The differences in the old and new canon (objective one) are highlighted when these two texts are read in dialogue. Born into a life where patriarchy is the rule, Jasmine’s very existence is almost ended before it could really begin, by her own mother. Jasmine never really finds her place, always being too weak to think for herself, and instead, lets the men around her create her identity for her. I do not agree in the previously written final exam entitled, “New Women of a New Age” when it is stated that Jasmine is forced into her opinions by her cultural background, instead, she is never taught to have an opinion at all. Jasmine is willing to be the traditional, submissive woman until she realizes this is not what her husband wants so she becomes something else. She goes along throughout the novel, changing herself to please others, but the reader never really understands who the real Jasmine is, what her inner-most thoughts and feelings are. If anything, Jasmine shows just as much weakness as the women in Train to Pakistan who are not given a choice because she is given a chance to make her own way in the world and instead, still chooses to conform and let men think for her.

Women are as equally subjugated and oppressed through enforced submission in Things Fall Apart, but it is enacted much more through violence than in Jasmine. Okonkwo is the epitome of oppressor in the novel, almost as much as the colonizers who come into his village at the end of the novel. In this case, not only can the colonizers be understood as the villain, but the colonized as well. In reference to objective two, Okonkwo dehumanizes women, who are the other, in the same way the colonizers dehumanize the villagers. “His whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness” (13) and because of this emotional state, he ruled his family through violence. To show any emotion other than anger was a sign of weakness and only women were emotional. Women were not allowed to grow the same types of crops, were not allowed to be on the counsel and were not allowed to speak out against the violence that plagued their houses. Okonkwo truly thought that any man who could not control his household was not a man. However, he shows the ultimate weakness when he kills himself at the end of the novel. His wives and children were much stronger than he because they endured all of the violence, subordination, and inequality. The male is strong and like a warrior, but the female is where one finds refuge and support in times of adversity. In any case, this should make the woman more powerful, but instead, she is still voiceless.

                In Heart of Darkness there is a slight change in the way women are portrayed. Instead of them being rendered helpless through cultural views and violence, they are not given a chance to think for themselves at all because they are never given the truth. The novel does not allow room for a woman’s voice in the same way that it does not allow room for the African’s voice. There are no names given for Kurtz’ intended or the African woman described as “savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent, a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman” (142). Achebe argues that these two women are used as a foil to one another; the same way Africa is a foil to Europe. The African Intended and European Intended are portrayed as “a savage counterpart to the refined, European woman who will step forth to end the story.” While the African Intended is never given a chance to speak, the European Intended is almost non-existent until the end of the novel.

                In the beginning of Heart of Darkness, the doctor makes a statement that puts the male’s view of women into perspective. “Its queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own. If they were to set it up, it would go to pieces before the first sunset” (77). Women are never given an opportunity to speak because men keep the true ways of the world from them for “protection.” In the previous final exam entitled, “Contact Between Women and the Outside World,” the author argues that women are kept separate as a deliberate action taken to protect the women both for their own sakes and for the sake of the men who created them as the lesser. The more information the Intended had about Kurtz and his explorations, the more she would be able to think for herself. The more she was left in the dark, the less she would have a reason to question his real intentions, thus, removing the opportunity for her to have a voice.

                One must realize the time period literature is written in and try to understand the state of things as the novel was written, but there is a large gap between acceptance and the ability to question. The women in these four novels were not given a chance to think for themselves due to society, culture, or history, but that does not forgive the weakness of the men’s actions. While men were portrayed as the stronger sex, the women’s endurance of years of oppression actually made them the stronger of the two. If the women are far removed from reality so they will not question their existence it does not make them weak, just uninformed. It took a while for the gap between truth and delusion to close, but when it did, women were finally given a voice.