LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 18:9 September 2018
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
         Dr. S. Chelliah, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Writing as Agency to the Caged Birds

Shivani Latwal

Abstract

In this article, an effort would be made to establish how writing helps women, especially the downtrodden ones, forge their identities. The paper will follow the lives of three women who belong to different cultural and social background and attempt to show how these women, who fought against all odds, asserted their self by the act of writing

Keywords: writing, agency, women writers, protest, voice.

The written word is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools that mankind has ever created. By putting pen to paper and writing about one's feelings and emotional turmoil writing almost becomes curative. It heels and sooths as it offers individuals to express their dilemma and quandaries about which they cannot yet speak. The power of the written word cannot be denied as it allows the silenced tongues to share their memories, stories and other facets of their human experience thus opening up avenues for self -expression, self -discovery and creativity. Writing, therefore, becomes a way to freedom; it has a cathartic effect and helps us to find our unique voice.

A question of vital importance then arises that if writing is such an influential and therapeutic medium for individuals, a mode of self-assertion then why do we not come upon texts written by women before the eighteenth century? The bookshelves of libraries abound in a plethora of texts written by male authors, but the tradition of women's writing does not exist. Virginia Woolf in her pathbreaking book A Room of One's Own throws light upon the British literature of Elizabethan period which was extremely prolific in nature and was marked by a great output in literature. This was a time when the male dramatists and poets were most active, but the women were curiously absent or silent. "For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed was capable of a song or a sonnet" (Woolf 64). Woolf looks into history to make an inquiry as to why women have not contributed intellectually and economically to the society. History is primarily the history of the male and not of the female. Feminists reinterpret history as 'his- story’ something which records and covers only the accomplishments of the males. A woman influences the lives of heroes and is generally the subject of majority of fiction but there is a huge chasm between their representation in fiction and reality. In reality they lack an identity of their own. We have a substantial knowledge of our fathers’ lives, their professions and distinction. But of our foremothers we know nothing except their names, the husbands who had been chosen for them and the number of children they gave birth to. A few women who might have dared to venture into writing would have been stalled and thwarted by people, ostracized by the society, termed as and witches all of which lead to their imagination and literary skills being bulldozed.

This is only the beginning part of the ARTICLE. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Shivani Latwal
Guest Faculty and Research Scholar
M.B.G.P.G. College, Haldwani
Kumaun University, Uttarakhand
Address: Latwal House, near Rainbow School
Bithoria No. 1. Haldwani. Uttarakhand.
263139
shivanilatwal@gmail.com

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