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Explorations
Established 1969

A Literary and Research Journal

Volume 26
2015

Established 1864

Editorial Board
Mahrukh Nishat
Editor

UmerKhan
Co-Editor

Department of English Language and Literature

GC University, Lahore.

______ ~c _~,=.~mr~ ""=""'mr""'Q~tiA===.==;;;==, -

All correspondence and contributions should be addressed
to the Editorial Board
at
explorations@ [Link]. pk

Published by

Department of English Language and Literature

GC University, Lahore.

Cover Design by

Haseeb-Ullah Waqar

Printed at

Sheeza Arts 0300-4387336

Advisory Board
Dr. Claire Chambers
Senior Lecturer in English & Related Literature, University of York,
UK
&
Editor 'Journal of Commonwealth Literature'

Dr. Anjali Gera Roy

Professor of English, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur,
India

Dr. Hameedah Nayeem Bano

Professor & Chairperson, Department of English, University of
Kashmir, Srinagar.

Dr. Waseem Anwar

Professor & Dean of Humanities, FCC University Lahore.

Dr. Anjum P. Saleemi

Professor of Linguistics, University of Lahore.

Dr. Aalia Sohail Khan

Professor of English & Director University of Gujrat, Rwalpindi
Campus.

Dr. Pao Hsiang Wang

Associate Professor of Foreign Languages & Literatures
National Taiwan University, China.

Dr. Amra Raza

Associate Professor & Chairperson, Department of English,
University of Punjab, Lahore.

Dr. Nadia Anjum

Associate Professor, Department of English, Kinnaird College for
Women, Lahore.

Dr. Furrukh A. Khan

Associate Professor of English, Lahore University of Management
Sciences.
Dr. Vttam. B Parekar
Associate Professor of English, Yashwant Mahavidyalaya, Wardha,
India.

Dr. Amrita Ghosh

Lecturer in English, Seton Hall University, USA.
 Contents

Editorial 1

Articles

1. The Demonic Angel Rises From Within the Angel 4

in the House: Finding Mystery Women in Victorian
Sensation Fiction
Neelam labeen

2. The Orient: A Gendered Narrative for Identity 25

Sana Haque

3. Problematics of Environmental Vision in Cave 43

Birds (1978): A Study of Ted Hughes'
Ideological Overtones
Dr. Rajbir Parashar

4. Paralingual Mode of Expression in Sylvia Plath's 53

"Ariel" & Bee Poems
Sadia Maqbool

5. Metaphysical Overtones in Acceptance of 67

Suffering in Eugene O'Neill's Tragic Characters
Maryam Inaam & Irfan Randhawa

6. The 'Melancholic' Subjects in Mohammad 81

Hanif's Our Lady of Alice Bhatti
Maimoona Khan

Essays

1. How I Wrote My Books? 88

Dr. Tariq Rahman

2. My, Me, I; Ours, We, Us; Theirs, They, Them 102

Dr. Waqas Khwaja

L . _
Poems

Cogito 111
Then and Now!
Dr. Anjum P. Saleemi

Blue is a Vicious Colour 112

KomalNazir

On Living 113
Sojourn
Mahrukh Nishat

Book Review

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood 115

AzkaShahid

..
-:'";:-
 <!Explorations 2015 1

Editorial

One has always felt inspired by the legend of a sculptor

in ancient times. The story goes that there was a sculptor whose
sculpting dexterity was matched by no one in his times, except
for his young son who showed an extraordinary flair in his art.
Interestingly, if ever the boy asked his father about the worth of
his art, the sculptor appreciated him in a way which always
surprised him. The boy would try to make as many' pieces as
possible to receive the desired appraisal from his father.
However, after looking at every new piece created by his son,
the sculptor told him that his work showed the mark of a true
sculptor but still a little more could be done to create a
masterpiece. The persistence in this attitude started frustrating
the boy and he devised a scheme to read the real thoughts of his
father on his art. He spent days and nights to create just one
sculpture, and on its completion, he hid it at a place in the
mountain wherefrom they would carve out fine stone for their
sculptures. As a matter of routine, the father and son visited the
place to fetch more stone. And 10 and behold! What the father
discovered there was a real masterpiece. He called out his son
and said, 'Son, this is what I call a true masterpiece and I wish
that you be a sculptor of this gifted artist's caliber'. The son
looked at his father triumphantly and revealed that he wasthat
gifted artist himself. The father paused and kept quiet. Then he
retorted, 'Dear son! You did succeed in surpassing me in my art
but I wish you had labored not for my sake but for your own
sake. I knew it already that you had a long way to go. But now
this injudicious pride of yours has stopped you where you are!'

If we look at the contemporary scene of research in the

country, particularly in the disciplines of Social Sciences and
Humanities collectively, the picture does not appear all too
bleak - at least in statistics. So, one does not opt to harp on the
oft repeated tune that 'nothing is happening!' We are trying to
do much like the sculptor's son. But also like him, we are being
unmindful of what is lacking. The same can be said about the
arena of literature in the country. One cannot risk generalizing

L _
l!Exp!orationll' 2015 2

this understanding for all literatures being produced in a

linguistically diversified country. But this observation can hold
some truth for the mainstream literatures being produced in the
representative languages of the country such as Urdu and
English. A minute scrutiny of the whole phenomenon of literary
and research activities in these two languages can reveal that
there is access without worth. There is this mad race for
research without much inclination towards exploiting this
madness for a greater scholarly and intellectual pursuit. There
are researches being done without establishing a thriving culture
for genuine inquiry. There are literatures being produced
without feeling the need to re-interpret our aesthetic, intellectual
and cultural temperament in a highly technological world. We
are becoming researchers, without being inquisitive anymore.
We are becoming writers, without being intuitive anymore. A
march of literary and academic progress we witness, but what a
march, that thrives by being penny wise and pound foolish!

What is direly needed is to look for and accordingly

inculcate an intrinsic value in all the literary and research work
we are producing. We need to do this if we want our work to be
broad-based in terms of being socio-culturally relevant and
genuinely engaging for a wider audience in the country or
abroad. In terms of literary and research publications, we need
to keep our numbers right; true! But all the same, there is also
this need to keep right our objectives of intellectual inquiry and
the likely outcomes. And for this, the foremost action we need
to take is to come out of our self-congratulating stance for
having multiple literary and scholarly accomplishments. More
so, if we do not want our love's labor lost in the years to come.

Indeed one cannot turn a blind eye from those few

writers, scholars and researchers who are trying to keep the
flame of original inquiry lit in the best possible way, but still
more is needed to establish and expand an inclusive culture of
scholarship and literary rendering. In the understanding of this
humble self, the measure to be taken is twofold. On one hand,
the present researchers and writers of all sorts need to work with
at least some measure of genuine inquiry and contemporary
relevance alongside the monitory and professional up scaling.
 QExplorations 2015 3

As historically speaking, the necessity to be genuinely refined

in socio-cultural thinking, sensibilities and practices has always
weighed heavier than the necessity to be financially prosperous
and remain merely so.

On the other hand, we need the hard task masters like

'the sculptor' in the arenas of language and literature and all
related disciplines. The responsibility of seasoned academicians
and literary critics is humongous in this regard. Only these are
the people who can ensure what must be ensured in any pursuit
of knowledge i.e. the intrinsic value of a literature or a research
for a society. Neither a great literature nor a genuine research is
devoid of a profound connection with the socio-cultural
dynamics of its present and the likely value for its future. Had it
been so, then the Shakespeares and Ghalibs of all ages would
have merely talked about their self-complacent daydreaming
and reveries without having any relevance to us today. Thus, a
complete and healthy re-interpretation of our intellectual
outlook is needed lest we continue contributing in a stagnant
pool of redundant and cliched ideas in the fields of literature
and research alike.

We have got our work cut out for us and we need to

realize that we have a long way to go. Explorations2015 can be
considered only one step in that direction, with a hope that we
carry the torch and remain perseverant, so that the journey of
explorations continues!

Mahrukh Nishat

23.11. 2015

L _
 (!Explorations2015 4

"The Demonic Angel Rises From Within the Angel in

the House"l: Finding Mystery Women in Victorian
Sensation Fiction

Neelam Jabeen

Abstract

Depiction of female characters in fiction is usually

considered to be very typical, revolving around
Mary/Eve dichotomy. This mythical construction of
women is against the idea of what "actual" woman
is. Mythical woman is the construct of a
patriarchal society; she is an "absolute Other"
and to be acknowledged as Woman, she has to
remain so. There are some attempts at creating a
third category of woman- "mystery," but as the
work reaches the end, the mystery is resolved. This
paper looks at the representative works of two
Victorian female authors-Mrs. Henry Wood's
East Lynne (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's
Lady Audley's Secret (1862)-and one male
author-George Moore's Esther Waters (1894), all
sensation fiction writers. By closely reading the
depiction of female characters in the chosen works
of these authors, the paper tries to show that a
third or a "mystery" category of women exists in
literature, as De Beauvoir also asserts, but the
paper also tries to prove that this "mystery" is not
merely a "mirage," opposing De Beauvoir's claim.

Literature always fails in attempting to portray

"mysterious" women; they can appear only in the
beginning of a novel as strange, enigmatic figures; but

I The title is borrowed from Nina Auerbach's Woman and the Demon (186)
'!explorations 2015 5

unless the story remains unfinished they give up their

secret in the end and they are then simply consistent and
transparent persons ... Mystery is never more than a
mirage that vanishes as we draw near to look at it. (De
Beauvoir 1270-71)

De Beauvoir in her The Second Sex devotes a chapter to

the idea of "the myth of woman" and shows how this mythical
woman is in contrast to the "flesh-and-blood" woman (1265).
This contrast between the mythical woman and the "actual"
(1265) woman creates the binaries of good/bad or
angelic/monstrous. Mythical woman is the construct of a
patriarchal society; she is an "absolute Other, without
reciprocity, denying against all experience that she is a subject,
a fellow human being" (1266) and to be acknowledged as
Woman, she has to remain so. De Beauvoir argues that the
difference between man and woman is not the question-they
are different and there is no denying the fact. The problem
arises when the "actual" woman is judged against the mythical
woman and on finding the contradiction between myth and
reality; it is the woman who is thought to be wrong, not the
myth. If a woman is true to the expectations of a patriarchal
society i.e. she conforms to the myth, she is a good woman;
anything contrary to this labels her as a "bad woman" (1266).

There is yet another myth related to women according to

De Beauvoir-"feminine mystery." This mystery is an easy
escape for man when he cannot or does not want to understand
a woman. From her happiness, fears, joys to her menstruation
anxiety and labor pain, everything is inexplicable for man,
hence mysterious (1272). De Beauvoir asserts that a woman,
similarly, cannot understand a man, he too is a mystery but in a
patriarchal society there is no such thing as a "masculine
mystery" (1270).

De Beauvoir very aptly reveals the difference between

the mythical and "actual" woman. She asserts the reality that
there are not only two fixed transparent categories of women-
good or bad but there is another category that is neither
extremely good nor bad. This is the "mystery" category, but her
QExplorations 2015 6

claim is something that needs reconsideration when it comes to

the literature, especially fiction, produced by the Victorian
authors.

Victorian era was a time when the seeds of feminism as

a movement were being sown. Two of the reasons of feminist
issues being raised through literature in this particular time can
be: 1) many women were writing novels, and 2) women were
thought to be the major audience of the novels whether written
by male or female authors. Considering their audience, the
writers of both the sexes had to deal with the issues that were of
particular interest to their target audience. As a result, the work
being produced was essentially that which would attract its
audience irrespective of authors' loyalties with the feminist
movement or not, because like every other movement, feminism
too had its anti and pro groups. Heilmann and Sanders in their
article "The Rebel, the Lady and the 'Anti': Femininity, Anti-
Feminism, and the Victorian Woman Writer" have amply
discussed how even some female authors who claimed to be
anti-feminist were in fact on the same grounds as feminist as
both the groups were doing one and the same thing-"laying
claim to an 'authentic' as opposed to the other camp's
'artificial', flawed, corrupted, or unsexed femininity" (290). It
is not the scope of this paper to see who was claiming to be
feminist or not; however, it can easily be observed that some
writers of both the sexes were actually dealing with the
representation of "actual" or "authentic" woman.

Nina Auerbach in her Woman and the Demon considers

this phenomenon of men and women equally representing
female issues as "incidentally feminist" since this act was not to
bring forth the idea of underground female repression because
"the subversive paradigms ... pervade the Victorian imagination"
(185-86). Queen Victoria's rule was enough for the Victorian
men to see the relationship between women and power:

In the nineteenth century the dialectic between

womanhood and power was so central and general a
concern, one so fundamental to literature, art and social
thought of the period, that it is misleading to pigeonhole it
 QExploratiom, 2015 7

as "feminist" as though it were the concern of one interest

group alone (188).

The representation of "actual" or "authentic" femininity

as opposed to "'artificial', flawed, corrupted, or unsexed
femininity" takes us back to De Beauvoir's claim of "Myth and
Reality" (1265). It not only asserts the fact that there is a
difference between mythical and actual woman; Victorian
authors' commitment to an authentic representation also
nullifies De Beauvoir's claim that "[l]iterature always fails in
attempting to portray 'mysterious' women" (1270), as De
Beauvoir asserts in the quoted excerpt that such female
characters are found but only until the end of the story; the
mystery is resolved when men want to understand the women
eventually (1271).

In this paper I have tried to look at the representative

works of two Victorian female authors-Mrs. Henry Wood's
East Lynne (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady
Audley's Secret (1862)-and one male author-George
Moore's Esther Waters (1894), all sensation fiction writers. By
closely reading the depiction of female characters in the chosen
works of these authors, I have attempted to show that a third or
a "mystery" category of women exists in literature, as De
Beauvoir also asserts, but opposing De Beauvoir's claim, I have
also tried to prove that this "mystery" is not merely a "mirage"
(1271).

Victorian sensation fiction is perhaps the best place to

find the third, or "mystery" category of female characters.
Natalie Schroeder in her article "Feminine Sensationalism,
Eroticism, and self-Assertion: M.E. Braddon and Guida" states
that the reason of sensation fiction being significant today is the
fact that it highlights the unconventional attitude of the women
of that time who rejected the socially prescribed feminine traits
(87). This nonconformity on the Victorian woman's part holds a
different status for the modem readers as they may see in this
unconventionality an emancipated female; however, for the
critic of that time, this was a threat to the Victorian society's
ideals of femininity, what De Beauvoir would call "the myth of

I
 ~xplorations 2015 8

woman." So when the Victorian authors created characters like

Lady Audley in Lady Audley's Secret (by M.E. Braddon),
Barbara and Isabel in East Lynne (by Mrs. Henry Wood), and
Esther Waters in Esther Waters (by George Moore), these
characters were received by many as 'unnatural.' Critics like E.
S. Dallas considered depiction of such characters as the demand
of sensation fiction because this was the only way the authors
could create 'sensation' and attract the audience:

The fir~t object of the novelist is to get

personages in whom we can be interested; the next is to
put them in action. But when women are the chief
characters, how are you to set them in motion? The life
of women cannot well be described as a life of action.
When women are thus put forward to lead the action of a
plot, the must be urged into a false position. To get
vigorous action, they are described as rushing into
crime, and doing masculine deeds. Thus they come
forward in the worse light, and the novelist finds that to
make an effect he has to give up his heroine to bigamy,
to murder. .. and to all sorts of adventures which can only
signify her fall. The very prominence of the position
which women occupy in recent fiction leads by a natural
process to their appearance in a light which is no good.
This is what is called sensation; but if the novelist
depends for his sensation upon the action of a woman,
the chances are that he will attain his end by unnatural
means. (qtd. in Schroeder 89)

The complex representation of female characters by

Victorian sensation writers is deemed "unnatural" by critics like
Dallas as they fail to realize that woman is far more than either
an extremely 'good' or extremely 'bad' creature. Goodness,
according to such critics, is conformity to the social construct of
'femininity'; opposition to this model is evil and "false".

By depicting such so-called "unnatural" female

characters, the authors are not only creating sensation but are
also bringing forth the idea that extreme goodness is impossible
and the idea of being 'natural' is also a construct of the
QExplorations 2015 9

patriarchal society. A "flesh-and-blood" woman exists who can

have both the traits-good and evil. This third category of
women however is not as transparent as the "good" or "bad"
category-hence mysterious. To depict characters that are a
challenge to the norms of the society, are a challenge for the
authors as well. Lady Audley in Lady Audley's Secret is
certainly one of such challenging characters. " ... a character
who is simultaneously villain and victim, schemer and schemed
against, was one of the reasons that some early reviewers
greeted Braddon's novel as 'one of the most noxious book of
the modem times'" (Pykett, Introduction to Lady Audley's
Secret xix).

Lady Audley is described in the novel to be like an.

innocent child. The childish innocence reflecting through her
face and manners is dubious and has multiple layers.

That very childishness had a charm that few could resist.

The innocence and candor of an infant beamed in Lady
Audley's fair face, and shone out of her large and liquid
blue eyes. The rosy lips, the delicate nose, the profusion of
fair ringlets, all contributed to her beauty the character of
extreme youth and freshness. She owned to twenty years of
age, but it was hard to believe her more than seventeen.
Her fragile figure, which she loved to dress in heavy velvet
and stiff rustling silks, till she looked like a child tricked
out of a masquerade, was as girlish as if she had but just
left the nursery. All her amusements were childish. She
hated reading or study of any kind, and loved society
(Braddon 50).

This elaborate description of the Lady is very significant

in understanding her true character. The entire description
frames her as innocence incarnate. The words like
"childishness," "innocence," "infant," "fair," "freshness,"
"fragile" and, "girlish" invoke in the reader an extreme sense of
purity that is the ultimate characteristic of a child. Convincing
the reader of the purity and innocence of the character, the
writer achieves twofold purpose. It may imply that the character
in reality is as pure as described and it is the circumstances that
eventually lead her to take extreme decisions, or that this
~xploration5 2015 10

appearance is a fa~ade. The word "masquerade" used in the

description carries both the aforementioned potential qualities
of the character. Considering its literal meaning, out of the
context, it refers to Lady Audley's appearance as a sham.
Reading between the lines reveals another understanding of the
term "masquerade" that the reader becomes fully convinced of
later in the course of the novel. Under the lady-like appearance
is not an innocent child but a dangerously selfish woman who is
capable of doing anything to save herself. Joan Reviere in her
"Womanliness as Masquerade" brings up a similar theme of
women wearing the mask of 'womanliness' to hide "the
possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if
she was found to posse;ss it" (131). Lady Audley knows that to
be approved and acknowledged as a 'Lady' she has to give a
certain impression and if she fails to do that, there are fair
chances that her true self will be revealed. Reading the word
"masquerade" in the context it is placed in however reiterates
her quality of innocence as the word there implies that her lady-
like appearance is a "masquerade" because in reality she is like
an "infant" just out of the "nursery." This ambiguity created
through her description is proof enough of her mysteriousness.

Adding to Lady Audley's mystery is her four-layered

role in the novel. She is Helen Talboys, Lucy Graham, Lady
Audley, and Mrs. Taylor or "Madame." In each of her four
different roles, she appears before audience as a new person.
She is first introduced to the readers as Lucy Graham where
among all her charm lmd beauty, she is "the sweetest girl that
ever lived" (11). She is a housemaid of a respectable family and
is loved and admired by everybody who comes across her, not
merely because of her beauty but also for her good nature.
Because of all her qualities, she is proposed to by Sir Michael
Audley and the temptation of "no more dependence, no more
drudgery, no more humiliation" is so great that she reconciles to
erase "every trace of the old life ... every clue to identity buried
and forgotten" (16). By accepting Sir Michael's proposal she is
not only assuming a new role of Lady Audley but is also
committing bigamy. Tara MacDonald in her article "Sensation
Fiction, Gender and Identity" refers to this act of assuming a
different personage as "step[ping] out of one's character" that
!fxpiorations 2015 11

provides women "possibilities of empowerment" (128).

Originally Helen Talboys, Lucy Graham already has shunned
her real identity. As Helen, being deserted by her husband and
chained by the responsibility of a son, she cannot get out of the
miserable situation. Her physical beauty and a desire to lead a
happy and comfortable life let her 'step out of her character'
and become Lucy Graham, a housemaid. Although this act is
deception in the eyes of the society, whenever exposed, but in
reality she is doing no harm to anybody around her as long as
she is left alone. Even after being caught of all the treachery and
deception, she muses: "'1 was not wicked when 1 was young .. .1
was only thoughtless. 1 never did any harm, at least never
willfully. Have 1 ever been really wicked, 1 wonder? ... My first
wickednesses have been the result of wild impulses, and not of
deeply laid plots" (253). Her real "wickedness" arises out of the
circumstances that she cannot handle. Her survival depends on
her 'secret' remaining a secret and that can be done only when
her real identity is not revealed. To achieve this end, she
attempts to murder both George (her first husband) and Robert
(Mr. Audley's nephew and George's friend). MacDonald in the
aforementioned article while quoting Jonathan Loesberg states:
"the sensation novel locates anxiety about identity via its legal
and class aspect rather than any psychological aspect" (129).
Lady Audley's crimes are result of her acute desire to spend a
comfortable life of luxuries and riches-economic factor, not of
her 'madness'-psychological factor.

While seeing sudden shifts in her attitude in different

circumstances, a modem psychoanalyst may read her character
suffering form Multiple Personality Disorder, which in lay
man's term may be referred to as a type of madness. A close
study of the character however reveals other facts. She is not a
'mad' woman but a very complex character that does not fit into
the "good" or "bad" category of females. Robert is unable to
understand her countenance: '''what does it mean?' ... She is
altogether a different being to the wretched, helpless creature
who dropped her mask for a moment, and looked at me with her
own pitiful face, in the little room at Mount Stanning, four
hours ago. What has happened to cause the change?'" (127).
She is intelligible to Robert when she poses as he expects her
Qfxplorations 2015 12

to; when she is different from his expectation, he is bewildered.

It is this "mystery" about her that leads Robert to declare her
"mad." It is also in his interest to declare her "mad" because he
knows that if he does not do that, she will 'use her influence to
place him in a mad-house' (233).

When she became Lucy Graham, she had intentions of

being a good maid and she proved that. After accepting Sir
Michael's proposal, she intended to prove to him a good wife:
" .. .I became your wife, Sir Michael, with every resolution to be
as good a wife as it was in my nature to be. The common
temptation that assail and shipwreck some women had no terror
for me. I would have been your true and pure wife to the end of
time" (301). She can be good when circumstances allow her and
she chooses to be, but when her existence as she wishes it to be
is. in danger, she uses all the means to protect her. Her to and fro
movements from a "good" to "bad" person maker her an
unusual character who does not fit into the ideals of
'femininity." Thus this beautiful and innocent character, who
apparently has all the qualities of being an 'angel in the house'
has "secret[s]" to carry that make her a mysterious character-
neither an angel, nor a demon.

The Lady's confession of her "secret" is another tactic

on her part to save herself. It cannot be understood in terms of
De Beauvoir's claim of 'giving up the secret at the end.' She
does give justification for her crimes that were all based on a
'secret' that her mother was a mad woman and that she being
the daughter had the propensity to inherit her madness. She
might have a conviction that she may go insane someday but all
her actions, as already mentioned are not result of some
psychological derangement. All of her actions are well-planned
and organized. The aggression, intellect and strategy on her part
are inexplicable for Robert. She takes advantage of Robert's
bewilderment and becomes an accomplice in proving her 'mad'
for the doctor also declared that "she has the cunning of
madness with the prudence of intelligence" (323).

Her eventual confession in front of Robert in the

madhouse adds to her power and mystery that she invokes. She
Qfxplorationll 2015 13

tells him that she had killed George (as she did not know that he
had survived) and this confession could still not be used against
her for Robert would not want to bring more grief and shame to
his uncle, and even if he used it against her, the law could not
give a sentence worst than she had already accepted-feigned
madness in a madhouse (336). This confession on her part
makes Robert realize that she was beyond ordinary. Declaring
her mad and getting rid of her was in fact an implied confession
on Robert's part that he did not know how to handle this half
angel-half demon character. "Surely it is a small atonement
which I ask you to render for your sins. A light penance which I
call you to perform. Live here and repent" (333). This is proof
of Victorian male's inability to cope with the women who are
criminal or dangerous-mysterious. Instead of treating her as
any male criminal would be treated, she is sent to the asylum.
Even the reviewers of the novel at that time noted that "a
woman 'so depraved and devilish as Lady Audley' is an
impossibility" (qtd. in Schroeder 100). They considered her an
impossibility because they cannot understand her; she does not
fit in their transparent category of the 'woman myth.' It is
remarkable that here too, she 'steps out of her character' once
again, hence more 'empowered.' She achieves this
empowerment by escaping the law, and still spending a
comfortable life in the asylum as the doctors there were
committed to "the comfort of the English lady" (331).

Emotions are a significant ingredient of sensation

fiction. Heidi Hansson and Catherine Norberg in their "Storms
of Tears: Emotion Metaphors and the Construction of Gender in
East Lynne" notes that female character's emotional behavior is
usually the focus of the plot of sensation fiction because its
purpose is to arouse in the audience sympathy or revulsion for
the character (154). This definition, however, is too restrictive
because in Lady Audley's Secret it is not merely emotion that
the plot is based on. Lady Audley does show emotions like
anger, aggression, fear, jealousy etc. but these emotions are not
all that characterize her. Lady Audley's Secret is also based on
the Lady's actions. Her extreme actions are that make her an
extremely unconventional-mysterious character. Hansson and
Norberg have also studied Lady Audley's Secret in "Lady
~xploration5 2015 14

Audley's Secret, Gender and the Representation of Emotion." In

this article, the writers focus on Lady Audley's Secret to probe
into the constructed nature of the gender role. They observe that
the emotions of "shame" and "anger" are conventionally
attached to women and men respectively. But in the novel these
emotions are juxtaposed as regards their legal subjects. Women
are shown to be exhibiting "anger" while men are shown feeling
"shame." These reversed roles show how women while going
against their expected roles are reasons of bringing "shame" to
their men.

Isabel and Barbara in East Lynne by Mrs. Henry Wood

are two very significant characters in the Victorian female
characterization. Depiction of these essentially very different
characters simultaneously brings forth the contrast of the
"woman myth" and the "actual" woman. By putting both the
characters in the central position respectively, the author leaves
it to the imagination of the reader to see whether either of these
is 'the angel in the house,' 'demon' or 'angelic demon.' Sally
Mitchell in her Introduction to East Lynne notes, while quoting
Adeline Sergeant: "that East Lynne owed half its popularity to
the reaction against 'inane and impossible goodness' as the only
suitable characteristic for a heroine" (vii).

In East Lynne we may not find the type of sensation that

we saw in Lady Audley's Secret, still, the novel in its own right
depicts female characters that are unconventional. Both the
major female characters-Isabel and Barbara are juxtaposed
with each other by putting them in the central position one after
the other. This provides the readers a chance to decide who
possibly the heroine of the novel is. The title of the novel also
does not help much in this regard as usually if there is one
central character, the novels are named after that, Esther Waters
and Lady Audley's Secret for instance. It is perhaps the place
called East Lynne that determines when one assumes the status
of the heroine while the other loses it.

As already mentioned, 'the impossibility of inane

goodness' is an important theme of the novel and the author
very carefully sketches the characters so that the reader may see
QExploratiom, 2015 15

how one character be angelic at one time and evil on the other,
or both at the same time. Lady Isabel is introduced in the novel
in the beginning as nothing less than an angel:

Mr. Carlyle looked, not quite sure whether it was a human

being: he almost thought it more like an angel. A light,
graceful, girlish form, a face of surpassing beauty, beauty
that is rarely seen, save from the imagination of a painter,
dark shining curls falling on her cheeks and shoulders
smooth as a child's, fair delicate arms decorated with
pearls, and a flowing dress of costly white lace. Altogether
the vision did indeed look to the lawyer as one from a
fairer world than this (8).

In the description, use of the words "angel" and "child"

refer to the fact that she is not only physically beautiful but
innocent from inside too. Later in the description she is also
said to have a "sad sorrowful look" (8). "Sorrow" and
"suffering" are also feelings of those who are victims and not
those who are evil and monstrous.

Barbara on the other hand is described differently: "a

pretty girl, very fair, with blue eyes, light hair, a bright
complexion and small aquiline features" (16). She does not
invoke in the reader a sense of fantasy, as does Isabel. Further
she is referred to be "impatient" (16, 20) and 'willful' (17). She
is not "gentle" or "yielding" like her sister Anne (25). She is
sensuous as she enjoys Carlyle's kiss (24). She truly loves
Carlyle and the narrator's comment that "true love is never
timid" (25) throws more light on Barbara's character. She is a
total contrast to Isabel in her looks as well as character.

Isabel's fall rests on her jealousy that she feels for

Barbara and she eventually leaves Carlyle and elopes with
Levison, a renowned villain. It is significant that while
everybody knows about his villainy, Isabel cannot see that and
thinks that he truly loves her. This naivety on her part is also
part of her character. Such 'angelic' and 'childish' characters
are prone to folly. They are drawn by their creators in such a
way that they appear neither victims, nor villains, or both at the
same time. They arouse pity and anger in the audience
 <!Explorations 2015 16

simultaneously and this aspect of their characters makes them

the 'third or mystery category.' Nina Auerbach in her article
"The Rise of the Fallen Woman" refers to 'demythicization of
the "fallen woman"--a bad woman, where it has been realized
that she is not always the agent, but victim too (31). This
demythicization enables the authors of the Victorian sensation
fiction to sketch women in a light that is neither too good, nor
bad- namely mysterious. Barbara, on the other hand, is
intelligent and strong-not befitting the Victorian ideals of
'femininity.' Isabel who is epitome of femininity in the
beginning "falls" from her high pedestal. Barbara never quite
reached that pedestal; hence never fell.

'Angelic' Isabel's fall reinforces the author's implied

claim that there is no such category as an 'angelic woman' and
that it is just a myth. Barbara's character on the other hand also
reinforces the same point but from a different angle. She is
already a person who is unconventional and so she remains till
the end. After marrying Carlyle, she remains the same sensuous
woman who even does not mind ignoring her children for the
sake of her husband's company. She does not pose to be a
perfect stepmother for Isabel's children because she is not. She
was ambitious to prove her brother's inI10cence and she does
not give up her ambition after her marriage.

Both Isabel and Barbara are "mystery" characters

because both do not conform to the "woman myth." Barbara, as
already mentioned was introduced as a mystery and remained so
till the end. Isabel however was more complex a character in the
sense that she was first depicted as conforming to the "woman
myth" and then shown to be falling from her status of 'the
angel in the house.' After taking the wrong decision of going
away with Levison, she realizes her fault. She 'steps out of her
character' to return to East Lynne and in that new personage in
the form of Madam Vine, she regains everybody's respect and
love. The myth that Isabel deconstructs is that of extreme
goodness. Her 'stepping out of her character' makes her a
'mystery' but her eventual recognition by Carlyle is not 'giving
away the secret' but proving the fact that it is the same woman
<!Explorationl> 2015 17

who was once 'an angel in the house,' fell, and rose agam,
against the mythical standards of Victorian femininity.

Afy Hallijohn is another unique low class female

character in East Lynne. She may be considered an extremely
unconventional character that might not be as important as
Isabel and Barbara but plays an important role in understanding
the ideals of femininity in the Victorian society. She can well be
discussed in comparison to Isabel and Barbara. Like Barbara,
she is sensuous and ambitious, like Isabel, she falls prey to
Levison. Despite all her shortcomings, she finds a mate towards
the end and may continue to live her life. Her wedding and
Isabel's burial took place simultaneously (522) to signify that
"fall" happens when one is already on too high a pedestal; for
those who are unconventional, there is no "fall."

Esther Waters in George Moore's Esther Waters is

another very unique and unconventional character. Among all
the characters discussed so far, she is perhaps the most complex
and "mysterious" character.

A girl of twenty, short, strongly built, with short, strong

arms. Her neck was plump, and her hair of so ordinary a
brown that it passed unnoticed. The nose was too thick, but
the nostrils were well formed. The eyes were grey,
luminous, and veiled with dark lashes. But it was only
when she laughed that her face lost its habitual expression,
which was somewhat sullen; then it flowed with bright
humour. (I)

Her description is very unusual for a heroine as the

audience of this time is used to seeing beautiful, fragile and
angelic girls. Not only her physical appearance, her very
existence as the protagonist of the story is unusual because she
is a 'scullery maid'. To have a maid as the heroine and write her
story must have been a challenge for Moore, as Freud fourteen
years after the publication of Esther Waters still thought that
servant girls did not have a story. Annette Federico in her article
"Subjectivity and Story in George Moore's Esther Waters."
studies Moore's Esther Waters in contrast to Freud's assertion
that he made in 1907, about servant girls: " ... we can tell these
~xploration5 2015 18

persons their story without having to wait for their contribution"

(qtd. in Federico 142). Federico also observes that Moore's own
views about art and women in his pamphlet Literature at Nurse
are quite similar to what Freud said more than a decade after.
However the "scullery maid" Esther Waters does seem to have
a "story to tell" (146).

Putting her in the role of a maid, Moore is able to show

her as a practical character who not only knows the ways o(the
world but is also aware of her responsibilities. She is not a naIve
young girl like Isabel who would fall victim to circumstances.
Esther does "fall" but her fall is where she starts her story. She
does not consider her life to end when she was seduced; on the
contrary her story begins from that moment: "you was the father
of my child and it all dates from that" (Moore 195). Esther is a
very strong woman who can fight the circumstances instead of
succumbing. From the beginning till the end, she is fighting for
her survival.

After being seduced by William, she does not regret the

loss of virginity as much as she regrets his desertion: "It's
always a woman's fault, ma'am. But he should not have
deserted me, that's the only thing I reproach him with" (75).
Although she appears to be a religious girl but we do not find
any discourse of sin/repentance in the novel. Had she truly
realized that she had sinned, and repented, she would never
consent to go with William again. Her religion is a very
personal matter with her. She follows it as long as she can but
when she thinks that she is pressed by the circumstances, she
makes choices. "Ah religion is easy enough at times, but there is
other times when it don't seem to fit in with one's duty" (201).
When she tries to explain this to Fred, he refuses to listen to an
explanation saying: "how can such things be explained?" (201).
Fred cannot understand her because once he has seen her a
woman who seems to have sought penance but now when she
shows her intention of going back to William, she is a
"mystery" to him.

Esther is not only a mystery for Fred and other

characters but also for the readers. Like every "fallen woman"
(lExplorations 2015 19

discourse, a fallen woman wants a respectable man to marry her

without ever letting him know her past. What is strange and
mysterious about Esther is that she not only tells her story to
everybody, including Fred who wants to marry her, she also
rejects Fred's marriage proposal. Her decision of accepting
Williams proposal again is an attempt to continue her struggle
because accepting Fred would be a "closure" to her story where
she could see her life "from end to end" (qtd. in Federico 149).

Readers anticipate that after having settled down with

William, Esther's troubles would end but they are disappointed
because her story is not as simple as readers are used to reading.
William loses everything in betting and eventually dies and
Esther is again back to where she started. This circularity of her
circumstances denounces closure and end. Unlike other "fallen
women," Esther does not die. She continues to live with her son
who grows up to be a "young soldier" (326). Esther decision not
to tell her story to her son adds to her mystery because she has
started a new life that she wants to build on her own principles
and on her son's future, and not on her past. Despite her
difficulties, her status as an unmarried mother, Esther does not
'step out of her character.' Where stepping out of character
empowered some female characters like Lady Audley and
Isabel, Esther's insistence on her true self shows her extreme
power to fight. In her case, 'stepping out of the character' would
be more like an escape, last thing that Esther would do.

Moore's act of bringing such a character as Esther has

been viewed differently by different critics. Molly Youngskin in
her "George Moore's Quest for Canonization and Esther Waters
as Female Helpmate" sees introduction of a female central
character as following the footprints of Richardson. Moore used
the female character so that like Richardson, who had female
central characters, he could also create a piece that would help
him enter the canon. Annette Federico, on the other hand,
suggests that the female audience can be the reason why Moore
wrote such a novel (143). Whatever the reason be, Moore being
a male author has created a female character that is one of the
most complex female characters in Victorian sensation fiction.
She is an epitome of struggle against the harsh circumstances.
<!ExplorationS' 2015 20

Through her, Moore has challenged the Victorian myth of

womanhood.

Women's transgression from their prescribed roles on

the one hand relegates them from the status of a "good woman"
and "femininity," on the other hand, if this transgression is
praiseworthy, they are elevated to the status of "masculinity."
Karen Homey pertinently reveals this fact in her essay "The
Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity-Complex in
Women, as Viewed by Men and by Women:"

[I]n the most varying fields, inadequate achievement are

contemptuously called "feminine," while distinguished
achievement on the part of women are called "masculine,"
as an expression of praise." (qtd. in Homey 99)

Homey has critiqued Freudian concept of 'penis envy'

while arguing that this is only men's viewpoint. Men think that
when women are trying to do something bold and courageous,
this is an attempt to be masculine. Victorian sensation fiction
also seems to contest this claim because the female characters,
although are shown to depart from "femininity" which is a
social construct, but are never shown as being masculine. This
is where their "mystery" lies. They are women, yet unique and
different that they challenge the Victorian myth of womanhood.
Emily Steinlight in "Why Novels are Redundant: Sensation
Fiction and the Overpopulation of Literature" comes up with
another reason of the unique and unconventional female
.characters in Victorian sensation fiction. She asserts that the
routine female characters were so redundant in fiction "that the
paradigm of the redundant woman allowed novels to
incorporate specters of mass population into an ungovernable
female body" (503).

In all the female characters discussed so far, we have

seen that not only these characters were "mysterious"-
belonging to a third category of women, neither "good" not
"bad," these characters remained a mystery even after the story
ended. Going !Jack to De Beauvoir's claim of 'giving away the
secret' and finding the characters as 'merely a mirage', all these
female characters seem to reject this claim. Finally finding her
QExplorations 2015 21

last resort in a lunatic asylum under a new name is not Lady

Audley's defeat. She would only cease to be mysterious had she
died. Her bigamy, deceit, attempts at murder, and feigned
madness all make her an enigmatic character and to send her
away from the family and society is the acknowledgement of
her "mystery." Isabel after her fall suffers and does die, like a
typical fallen woman but the acceptance and acknowledgement
of others like Corny and Carlyle prove the author's point that
extreme goodness is impossible. There are no transparent
"good" or "bad". women. Isabel existed like an "actual"
character who can be an angelic demon or demonic angel.
Barbara is, through and through, an unconventional third
category woman who never conforms to the feminine ideals of
the society. Esther is the extreme example of the "mystery"
category who keeps moving between convention and
unconventionality. She is a good wife, a good mother and in
attempt to being so, she can succumb to all unconventional
means. According to Auerbach, such are not "good women" but
"mermaids" who "submerge their powers, not to negate it but to
conceal it:"
The mermaid is a more aptly inclusive device than the
angel, for she is the creature of transformations and mysterious
interrelations, able to kill and regenerate but not to die,
unfurling in secret her powers of mysterious, pre-Christian, pre-
human dispensation ... Fathomless and changing, she was an
awesome threat to her credulous culture. (Woman and the
Demon 7-8)
QExplorations 2015 22

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: the Life of a

Victorian Myth. Harvard University Press, 1982. Print.

---. "The Rise of the Fallen Woman." Nineteenth-Century

Fiction 35.1 (Jun. 1980): 29-52. Print.

Braddon, M. Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. Ed. Lyn Pykett.

Oxford: Oxford UP. 2012. Print.

De Beauvoir, Simon. "Myth and Reality" The Norton

Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

Eds. Leitch et al. New York: Norton, 2001. 1265-1273. Print.

Federico, Annette. "Subjectivity and Story in George Moore's

Esther Waters. "ELT36.2 (1993): 141-153.

Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

Hansson, Heidi and Catherine Norberg. "Lady Audley's

Secret, Gender and the Representation of

Emotions." Women's Writing. 20.4 (2013): 441-
457. Taylor and Francis Online. Web. 12 Apr.
2014.

---. "Storms of Tears. Emotion Metaphors and the

Construction of Gender in East Lynne." Orbis

Litterarum 67.2 (2012): 154-170. Web. 12 Apr.

2014.
Q[:xp[orationll 2015 23

Mitchell, Sally. Introduction. East Lynne by Mrs. Henry woods.

New Jersey: Rutgers, 1984. Vii-xviii. Print.

Heilmann, Ann, and Valerie Sanders. "The rebel, the lady and

the 'anti': Femininity, anti feminism, and the Victorian

woman writer." Women's Studies International Forum.

29.3. Pergamon, 2006: 289-300. Elsevier. Web.

14 Apr.2014.

Horney, Karen. "The Flight from Womanhood: The

Masculinity-Complex in Women, as Viewed

by Men and by Women" Female Sexuality:

Contemporary Engagements. Ed. Donna Bassin. Jason

Aronson, 1999. 97 - 113. Print.

MacDonald, Tara. "Sensation fiction, gender and identity" The

Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction. 1st ed. Ed.

Andrew Mangham. Cambridge: 127-140. Cambridge

Companions Online. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

Moore, George. Esther waters. Ed. Stephan Regan. Oxford: Oxford

UP. 2012. Print.

Pykett, Lyn. Introduction. Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth

Braddon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. vi-xxix. Print.

Riviere, Joan. "Womanliness as Masquerade." Female Sexuality:

Contemporary Engagements 8 (1999): 127-138

QExploration~ 2015 24
Schroeder, Natalie. "Feminine Sensationalism, Eroticism, and Self-
Assertion: M. E. Braddon and Ouida" Tulsa Studies in
Women's Literature. 7.1 (SpriNg, 1988): 87-103. [Link] Apr.
2014.

Steinlight, Emily. "Why Novels are Redundant: Sensation Fiction and

the Overpopulation of Literature." ELH 79.2 (2012): 501-535.

,-,

Wood, Mrs. Henry. East Lynne. Ed. Sally Mitchell. New Jersey:

Rutgers, 1984. Print.

Youngkin, Molly. "George Moore's Quest for Canonization and

Esther Waters as Female Helpmate." English Literature in

Transition, 1880-192046.2 (2003): 117-139. Print.

QExploratioUli 2015 25

The Orient: A Gendered Narrative for Identity

Sana Haqne

Abstract

A common interpretation of the oriental space in

Western discourse is based on a geographical
referent in order to produce a rhetoric of
difference and Otherness and thereby bring to life
Western identity. However, as we study this
discourse it becomes relevant that there is a
heterogeneous nature to the material produced,
and one can perceive the oriental space using a
gender referent. This paper proposes to examine
the Orient as a gendered space to constitute the
rhetoric of difference and the Self/Other binary,
where the native woman stands for the Other and
is viewed in paradoxically valuable and
derogatory terms. Through the gaze of the
occident, the oriental space is given the same
regard as that given to the indigenous woman; the
latter personifies the oriental space, and their
narratives are implicated in a dynamic
correspondence. As a result the narrative of the
native woman is not subsumed but, as it performs
both as a cultural and sexual referent for the
Other, it in itself is transformed and displaced.
consequently transforming the narrative of oriental
space. This paper aims to track the trajectory of
these dual narratives across the eighteenth,
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to
uncover their transformation with time, their
empowerment and de-familiarization, as they
perform to ferment an identity for the western
occident. Thereby a divided and heterogeneous
oriental discourse arises in a dialogue with and
Qfxplorations 2015 26

against the native woman, no longer to be

perceived as a mere imparter of a narrative of
silence.

A common interpretation of the oriental space in

Western discourse is based on a geographical referent in order
to produce a rhetoric of difference and Otherness. This serves to
create Western identity, which relies on the Other to determine
its own nature. However, upon further study of the discourse, a
new perspective arises with 'gender' as the privileged field of
reference. This paper will employ Montague's Turkish Embassy
Letters, Flaubert's Flaubert in Egypt and Forster's A Passage to
India to establish a certain archive of the Orient as a gendered
space, and the correspondence of its narrative to that of the
oriental woman, implicated through the gaze of the occident.
This archive marks a trajectory across the eighteenth, nineteenth
and twentieth centuries as the oriental space undergoes a rise-
and-fall transformation. What is underscored here is that the
narrative of the native: woman is not subsumed. As it performs
both as a cultural and sexual referent for the Other, it in itself is
transformed and displaced. Consequently it transforms the
narrative of oriental space, for either narrative informs the
other's.A divided and heterogeneous oriental discourse arises in
a dialogue with and against the native woman, who must no
longer be perceived as imparting a narrative of silence.

The rise in power and value of the female figure and

orient begins with Montague in the eighteenth century. During
her travels to Turkey, she produced a varied discourse that both
contradicts and supports the conventional tropes on the Oriental
woman. The exploration of space and woman, which by the
twentieth century becomes an occupation, is imperative in
developing Western identity according to the binary of
Self/Other. What must be noted is how such invention and
performance were involved in creating these discourses and
identities. That will allow us to proceed to Montague's own
work at making space and women perform even as she debunks
old stereotypes for realism.
~xplorations 2015 27

Meyda Yegenoglu posits that the matter of identity rests

on invention and construction, inclusive of fantasy and desire,
to generate a binary of Self and Other on imagined geographical
and hierarchal planes. The West comes into being when
"members imagine themselves as western" (3); their identity
relies on "a specific inhabiting of a place" (3). It is similar to the
purpose behind their imposition on the Orient - the creation of
the Other resides in the project to attribute himlher a
"sexualized nature" (2).

Unconscious and imagined, these desires for the

(spatial) Other take on a gendered nature in European discourse
as "a fantasy built upon sexual difference" (11). Yegenoglu
invokes that the '''veiled Oriental woman' has a particular place
in these texts, not only as signifying Oriental woman as
mysterious and exotic but also as signifying the Orient as
feminine, always veiled, seductive and dangerous" (11). This
hidden exotic is depicted as a damsel needing visibility and
salvation from the confines rendered upon her in the form of a
Western hero. The unveiled orient and oriental fastens "not only
to the discourse of Enlightenment but also to the scopic regime
of modernity which is characterized by a desire to master,
control and reshape the body of the subjects by making them
visible" (13). Manifesting from fantasy and riddled with
desirous relation between the Self and the Other, such
discourses constructed the world as territory needing the
"conquest of the 'rational' and 'civilized' European man" (11).
It is on the basis of a fantasized truth behind the veil that the
"Western/Colonial and the masculine subject construct their
own identity ... the structural homology between the Orient, veil
and feminine" (11). Herein there is a dynamic interplay between
the sexualized oriental female, the space in which she resides
and the masculine gaze that constructs and unveils the Other for
the sake of mastery and identity.

Lady Mary Montague joined the league of travel writers

with her exploration of and work on the Ottoman Empire in the
eighteenth century. She has since then been hailed for
debunking the various stereotypes produced on Turkish and
Oriental culture "as alternately violent and barbaric, slovenly
QExploratiollS 2015 28

and lascivious, or grotesque and incomprehensible." These were

used prior to support the justification of "cultural subordination
of the foreign and colonial cultures" (Hassan 37). Montague
chartered a discourse that contradicted earlier narratives,
including those on Turkish women that in many accounts were
described as "entirely sexual" (Hassan 39) and inferior to their
Western counterparts.

Her most notable response to these oriental figures is

inscribed in her details of entry into their private baths. "Tis no
less than death for a man to be found in one of these places" and
on being prohibited, men would indulge themselves in its
imagined unveiling (Montague 103). Montague, as a female, is
the figure that truly exposes the native women just as she
unveils this 'oriental' space: "it is built of stone, in the shape of
a dome ... five of these domes joined together. .. four fountains of
water. .. so hot with steams of sulphur proceeding from the baths
joining to it, 'twas impossible to stay there with ones clothes
on" (Montague 101).

She is full of praise for the women before her, for "I was
in my traveling habit. .. and certainly appeared very
extraordinary to them, yet there was ... none of those disdainful
smiles or satiric whispers that never fail in our assemblies"
(101). At this point Montague dismantles the rhetoric of
difference: while indeed drawing a contrast between the women
of the West and East, she inverts the hierarchy to favor the
Eastern figure. "I saw they believed I was so locked up in that
machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which
contrivance they attributed to my husband" (103) furthers this
cause to criticize her own society's lack of liberation. In fact,
the writer is convinced the Oriental women are "the only free
people in the Empire" (116). The native woman is free as her
space is free to her; her veil is her "masquerade" (115) that
contrives to grant her liberty without being discovered.

This rhetoric challenges "the orientalist discourse that

proposes the enslavement of Turkish women as a sign for
oriental barbarism" (Critical Terrains 43) to produce an
"emergent discourse about female independence" (Critical
'!Exploration!> 2015 29

Terrains 33) which complicate the conventional narrative on the

oriental woman. Montague ironically endorses the use of the
veil as a source for freedom even as she unveils her. Western
feminism and identity gain support from the narrative as the
writer identifies herself with these figures through dress and
shared custom.

However, upon further reading, Montague's descriptive

terms allocated to these figures become "supportive of the
differentiating rhetorics of culture that characterize orientalism"
(Critical Terrains 40). Her description borders on
categorization as she describes the women moving with a rare
"majestic grace" (Montague 101), "their skins shiningly white,
only adorned by their beautiful hair divided into many
tresses ... braided either with pearl or ribbon" (Montague 102).
She turns a homoerotic gaze on the women, stating, "The finest
skins and most delicate shapes had the greatest share of my
admiration" (Montague 102). The occident's gaze transitions
into possessiveness as she desires that the artist "Mr. Gervais"
could capture them: "It would have very much improved his art
to see so many fine women naked, in different postures"
(Montague 102).

Narin Hassan lends her interpretation of the harem as a

space that both sustains desire and authorizes access. In this
confined "space of the harem or bath and the space beneath the
veil" (Hassan 2) wherein her subjects lie, Montague creates
"metaphors" for her own "confined authorial space" as well as
the "notions of Eastern femininity which pervade her letters"
(2). In this regard Hassan argues that a link exists between the
oriental space in the form of the veil, the harem and the Eastern
woman. That Montague centers her focus on this particular
space may be innocent; on the other hand, it may have a higher
purpose. Hassan argues that "harems and baths were and
continue to be some the most sustained metaphors of Eastern
sexuality and mentality" (6), bringing together "notions of
pleasure and danger, desire and fantasy" (6) that fetishized this
impenetrable space in the European imagination. Billy Melman
endorses this supposition: "the hamam came to apotheosize the
sensual, effeminate Orient.. .the women's public baths were
Qfxp!orationll' 2015 30

identified as the loci sensuales in the erotically charged

landscape of the Orient" (Hassan 6).

Montague's 'niche feminist' perspective, even as it

moves space away from the fantastical realm, endorses those
very tropes so that her "constructions of these spaces continues
to be influenced by the very representations she hopes to
debunk" (Hassan 7). Examining the nude women in her own
covered attire, Montague cannot help but employ a masculine
gaze of superiority in her classifications, producing a
homoerotic response towards the figures and their baths. Harem
baths "become for Montague and others to follow, the most
available signifiers of Turkish women, and by extension, of all
Turkish life and activity" (Hassan 7).

The classification of the body and hence the space give

momentum to the agenda of capture and possession of the said
geographical and human bodies. Lady Mary Montague's
seeming love for "the fair Fatima" (Montague 133) leads to
pages of detail disclosing the exactness of this figures
aesthetics: "that surprising harmony of features ... her eyes!
Large and black ... nobody would think her other than born and
bred to be a queen, though educated in a country we call
barbarous" (Montague 134). Homoeroticism indulges in a male-
free space to destabilize the male discourse. However, at the
same time, Montague's articulation of affection is restricted to
"the established literary tradition that exists for the praise and
regard of female beauty, a male tradition ... means of
aestheticizing and anatomizing gaze" (Critical Terrains 48).

Classification and subordination to stereotypical tropes

is also found in her expression of space in the "inventory (of)
the bizarre and unusual animals found in Adrianople, including
camels, asses and buffaloes" which "are never thoroughly
tamed ... their heads ill-formed and disproportioned to their
bodies" (Montague. 127). For its coarseness, this 'space'
shadows the distinction made "between the Turks, with their
bizarre superstitions, and the English, with their more refined,
rational tastes" (Critical Terrains 50). It creates a hierarchy that
 Qfxplorations 2015 31

underscores the naturalness of colonial order through the

elements that define the oriental space.

Whether she intends it or not, Montague's rhetoric

complies with a larger imperialist program to instill the natural
order of colonialist rule over the barbaric or exotic others in
need of refinement. Even as she praises the liberated Turkish
woman and the veil that renders her space free, Montague
operates on this notion of similarity and difference to analyze
and stratify the figures and their space. Masculine tropes define
and so expose and subordinate them; as such there is a lingering
'male' presence in her own gaze which "makes manifest the
erotic and exotic charge of the space of the baths as the objects
of a voyeur's gaze" (Hassan 8). The voyeur in Montague not
only renders the space and its women visible but also sexual,
thence demarcating identity through difference. It shapes the
Western Self and legitimizes her authority even as it builds a
heterogeneous narrative.

The Western discourse encourages a performance of the

oriental woman and space, whereby a transformation is made
manifest across temporal bounds. These metamorphosed
representations expose "the changing historical circumstances,
and the changing proximity and shifts in power, between
western and non-western worlds" ("Orient as Woman" 1).
While the eighteenth century engendered the discovery and
eroticism of the Oriental woman and space, the nineteenth, with
the "crisis of western European individualism in the age of
industrialization and expansionism in the non-European world"
("Orient as Woman" 1) operated on a scientific scale. It served
to objectify and 'consume' the woman and space, which were
now present solely to serve rather than destabilize mainstream
discourse.

The instability that fomented with the French revolution,

the crises in family, gender and "national differences" with
"escalating imperialism" in the "race for empire" ("Orient as
Woman" 2) split identity asunder. Stability was sought through
projecting authority; this included condensing tensions into the
"topos of sexual difference between male and female" ("Orient

L_._
~xploration5' 2015 32

as Woman" 2). The eighteenth century, while sexualizing the

female figure, also explored this figure to appreciate her
superior beauty and freedom. As such, across 200 years, both
sexual and cultural referents are utilized to define the Other; the
"cultural Other of the Orient now becomes the 19th century's
sexual Other" ("Orient as Woman" 2).

Flaubert's private compilation of letters in Flaubert in

Egypt gives rise to the need for identity. It is implicated both in
his implied sexual impotence as he engages with Egyptian
whores, and in his longing for a home constituted in the orient.
He is not a traveler but a 'belated traveler,' seeking in the
familiar space something new to gain and, in this century, to
consume. Similar to Montague's feminized space, it is the
harem that invokes Flaubert's consumption and desire for
identity. There is a sense of longing in his description of Egypt,
the harem and the women it contains; prostitution for him holds
"a particular mystique ... one learns so many things in a brothel,
and feels such sadness, and dreams so longingly of love!"
(Steegmuller 9-10). The Orient with its beloved sun, antiquity
and religiosity renders "Flaubert's Orient no more mere
dreamlike decor. .. for Flaubert, the Orient gradually became a
kind of homeland ... that he had never seen" (Steegmuller 12).

His initial attitude toward Egypt is one of awe,

expressing the Orient as being all he had imagined and more,
for "it extends far beyond the [Link] idea I had of it. .. as though
I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams"
(Steegmuller 75). However, his later writing is deflated, even
lackluster as he claims "anyone who is a little attentive
rediscovers much more than he discovers ... the old orient. . .is
young because nothing changes" (Steegmuller 81). In this
regard Flaubert becomes that very belated traveler seeking new
and unfamiliar ground on known and classified soil.

A shifting attitude toward the space of the Orient also

seemingly applies to the women he encounters. These women,
specifically, are whores of the haram he enters. There is a
nostalgia attached to this portrayal of the Oriental space and
woman that is soon objectified for consumption. "Everything in
(fxploraliolls 2015 33

Egypt seems made for architecture - the planes of the fields, the
vegetation, the human anatomy," (Steegmuller 58) Flaubert
declares, and so utters truth at a level he has learned and re-
appropriated. For as he is exposed to this space and its women,
they are characterized in a similarly formulaic process that
replaces sexuality to dissect their "anatomy."

In this regard we can draw comparison with Nerval's

Voyage en Orient to Cairo in the same century; certain
prevalent tropes are visible in both narratives. That Flaubert's
letters aren't meant for the public further reveals the profound
effect these tropes had on the subconscious. And yet, his letters
often take on a performative role before the recipient with
tantalizing details of his many conquests and findings -
meaning his discourse may be performing to manifest a
mainstream narrative fitting for that time. As belated travelers,
both Flaubert and Nerval switch between "the unconscious
desire for a phantasm and the conscious discovery of its
emptied space" (Behdad 3), once they realize it hasn't much
more to offer beyond what they already know. There is also a
participation in '''Orientalist desire,' that is, the historical urge
to 'capture' the Other through the official discourse" (Behdad
4), whose "differentiating function Europe has often defined
itself' (Behdad 4) with.

Flaubert indeed struggles to capture the Orient with his

many classified details, expressed with scientific terseness:
"Effect: she in front of me, the rustle of her clothes, the sound
made by the gold piastress of her snood ... moonlight. She
carried a torch ... .firm flesh, bronze arse" (Steegmuller 40). The
experience passed, he notes a "demystification of the European
myth of the harem" (Behdad 12) and its women. His details
revert to call his sexual encounter "the effect of a plague victim
or a leperhouse ...her words .. .I did not understand ... lovemaking
by interpreter" (Steegmuller 40). His struggle to uphold the
myth of the harem as a site of love juxtaposes its base reality as
they must communicate with an 'interpreter.' As with Nerval,
the writer is "divided into a critic of the tradition pale reception
of Oriental culture and a nostalgic supporter of that myth"
(Behdad 12). However, the post-journey letters eradicate the
Q1;xplorations2015 34

"romance of the harem" (Behdad 12), oriental space and its

women.

"On the stairs, opposite us, surrounded by light and

standing against the background of blue sky, a woman in pink
trousers" (Steegmuller 114); Flaubert's first meeting with the
famed Kutchuk-Hanem maintains the very distance that
perpetuates oriental fantasy. Initially perceived as "remote"
("Orient as Woman" 10), she too satisfies the illusion of
"imagined exotic place of beauty and the infinite" ("Orient as
Woman" 9). Describing her as "slightly coffee-coloured ... her
eyebrows black, her nostrils open and wide; heavy shoulders,
full, apple shaped breasts" (Steegmuller 114), Flaubert is able to
render her Other, strange, even calling her "creature" as though
she is bestial. The writer utilizes this near proximity to
"aestheticize her image, to reduce her as object" ("Orient as
Woman" 10).

His desire to find love in her, as to find home in the

Orient, is visible in his repeated habit when they sleep together:
"I dozed off with my fingers passed through her necklace, as
though to hold her should she awake" (Steegmuller 118). He
reiterates, "I had slipped my forefinger under her necklace"
(Steegmuller 130) as he watches her sleep. There is a desire to
grow close to this woman, yet using her possessions to do so
still alienates her even as she sleeps by his side. She is
unreachable and objectified, even as he tries to reach her,
claiming "How flattering it would be to one's pride if at the
moment of leaving you would be sure ... that you would remain
in her heartl" (Steegmuller 119). This "infinite sadness"
(Steegmuller 159), however, is soured by his description of their
lovemaking as "coups" (Steegmuller 130). Flaubert's scientific
details of her gestures, her anatomy, essentially objectify her in
a failed attempt to possess her.

After his journey there is a notable shift in his attitude

toward the Orient. Lowe in Critical Terrains argues that
Flaubert utilizes the narratives of space and woman to make
sense of his own contemporary period and identity. The woman,
both "transcendent and material," evoking "ambivalence" (80),
<!Explorations 2015 35

relates to the rhetoric on space produced by Flaubert. Egypt is

accused of creating inertia as Flaubert becomes "less and less
covetous of anything at all" (Steegmuller 95). This befallen
glory of the now unveiled space is applicable to the oriental
woman as well: "As for Kutchuk-Hanem ... correct your ideas
about the Orient. Be convinced that she felt nothing at all:
emotionally, I guarantee, and even physically" ....(Steegmuller
220). Disappointment relegates the "oriental woman" to being
"no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one
man and another man" (Steegmuller 220).

His nearly pornographic detail now "dehumanizes the

Egyptian woman" ("Orient as Woman" 11) into an "exploited"
machine producing "sexual pleasure for man to consume" who
in lacking humanity lacks "fatigue" and "self-consciousness"
("Orient as Woman" 11). By using the industrial terms of the
nineteenth century terms, he turns her and the orient into "the
means of production, that bourgeois man masters, and this
mastery becomes the foundation of individualism and
subjectivity in the industrial age" (11). Speaking of Kutchuk's
bedbugs, Flaubert proclaims "they were the most enchanting
touch of all. .. a touch of bitterness in everything" (Steegmuller
220). Here he shows how, for him, woman compounds the
"excessive and overwhelming nature against which the civilized
man must distinguish himself' ("Orient as Woman" 11). He
exposes "not only hatred of the Other as oriental, but hatred of
the Other as woman" ("Orient as Woman" 11), figures that can
provide, be bought and exchanged. In this sense, as with Nerval,
Flaubert discontinues the dominant mode of representation as
"the distinctions between the phantasmic vision of the Other
and the scientific and institutional approaches to the Orient are
collapsed" (13). The Orient and its women are no longer
explored and attributed with power and mystery. Through
authority and a sense of superiority, they are now classified,
objectified and turned into a conquered product for
consumption in the era of empire and identity.

With the twentieth century, the upsurge in nationalist

ideology and struggle within the oriental space transforms the
female narrative. Forster's A Passage to India tackles
~xp[orationl> 2015 36

imperialism, nationalism and homoeroticism all on the

feminized space. Oriental India and the native woman, both
silent and distant, are simultaneous recipients of power
dynamics, interruptions to the homoerotic discourse and
damsels that both ensure and needs independence.

Both India and its metonymy in the Marabar caves

encapsulate the notion of space, which prevails "like some low
but indestructible form of life indestructible form of life." This
infinite expanse is "interrupted" by the Marabar caves, "a group
of fists and fingers that are thrust up through the soil" (Forster
5-7). Eager to see "the real India" (Forster 21), Adela and Mrs.
Moore are dismayed by the reality of the caves and India:
"Nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question
causes it to disappear or to merge into something else" (Forster
78). The text shall firstly be utilized to inform on the role of
women and power dynamics. Trapped within the caves, Adela
believes she has undergone a rape and Mrs. Moore, hearing the
"ou-boum" feels it has "in some indescribable way undermined
her hold on life" (Forster ix) with its roaring meaninglessness.
This is echoed in the very portrayal of the female figures in
India: the "purdah women" veiled already are also isolated at
the interracial party, "their backs to the company ... an island
bared by the turning tide, and bound to grow" (Forster 37).

These figures lack coherence and form as they cannot

string words together without "making tiny gestures of
atonement or despair" (Forster 38); Adela's attempts to
communicate fail as she strives "in vain against the echoing
walls of their civility" (Forster 39). Displaced, silenced,
incoherent, "as if they sought for a new formula which neither
East nor West could provide" (Forster 38), these women
produce the selfsame echo found in the caves and India's own
silence toward her colonizers. To Adela, India would slip by
"unnoticed ... colour would remain the pageant of
birds ... brown bodies, white turbans ... but the force that lies
behind colour and movement would escape her" (Forster 42-3).
In seeking out this force, she relies on Aziz to provide it over
the silent women - this is her undoing, for it is the women's
narrative that carries the narrative of India. Yet this too lacks
~xploration$ 2015 37

power for "no one could romanticize the Marabar, because it

robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness" (Forster 139),
rendering them little more than hollow shells.

The act of imagined rape within the space, then,

becomes part of a "transgression of boundaries" (Silver 4). The
narratives of all women overlap as sexuality is deployed "within
a discourse of power that posits a complex network of sameness
and difference" (Silver 4) based on race and gender. This
'masculine' system of power "makes sexuality a material reality
of women's lives" (Silver 6); the women are relegated into
objects for pleasure. They are essentially 'rapeable' so that
"when Adela speaks rape ... she speaks from within a discourse
of sexuality that crosses racial lines and objectifies all women"
(Silver 10). Perceiving this power as a masculine imposition
allows the Englishwoman to register what the oriental figure, in
her silence, cannot - that echo of being raped, the boom of
violence upon it reflects the attack personified in Adela.

This transgression infiltrates the veil as Aziz's wife is

made visible through her photo, first by Aziz, then McBryde,
who proclaims "Wife indeed! I know these wives!" (Forster) as
he confiscates the item. A simple photo implies "Indian women
are whores" (Silver 14) and renders the invisible wife an
emblem of "woman both as object of exchange and as object of
violation" (Silver 14). For in 'knowing' her, McBryde
subordinates the Indian woman under his power, and that too as
a sexual object exposed before his eyes for possession. It is a
violation, an act of rape itself, where the "woman in this
photograph is twice named and twice silenced ... as object of
exchange, and later. .. as object of an object" (Silver 15) i.e. the
objectified Indian male.

A dual narrative is at play that reveals the rape-able

nature of both woman and space, constituted in their gendered
form. By eliciting this rape - through the loud "ou-boum"
(Forster 137) of the caves and the cry of rape by Adela, there is
a resistance against it and against the hierarchy of power that
allows men to impose themselves on images and spaces with
preconceived ideas. No longer can they declare that "England
QE:xplorations' 2015 38

holds India for her own good" (Forster 102). And yet, there is
resentment towards 1his female figure, the Englishwoman
speaking for her silent Indian counterpart, because with her
outcry "she creates another gap, one that disrupts rather than
enabling the discourse of power and knowledge" and generates
an opposing discourse undermining male control.

In this regard we come across the second 'element' of

interruption by the woman in homoerotic discourse. The figure
of Hamidulla Begum reminding Aziz of man's obligation to
woman and nation with marriage and offspring are treated with
disdain. Aziz's wife's face "he forgot.. .at times .... the more he
looked at the photograph the less he saw" (Forster 50-1). This
erasure and silence of the woman is ironic as we proceed to
discuss the matter of nationalism, but in this case, Forster
"evokes a scenario in which a darker, more sensual, usually
foreign and/or lower class character initiates the repressed, often
intellectual English man or woman into an awareness of his or
her sexuality" (Silver 4). In A Passage to India, the figure of
Aziz becomes the source to waken Fielding's slumbering
sexuality.

Any infiltration of this homoerotic discourse renders

women the scapegoat, as when Aziz is annoyed at Adela and
Mrs. Moore interrupting his conversation with Fielding, or
when the latter thinks "I knew these women would make
trouble" for being late. The "male bonding achieved in this
novel, as in patriarchal societies in general" is conducted
"through the exchange or mediation of women" (Silver 12).
Aziz's exposure of his wife to Fielding effectively paints the
latter as a voyeur in a domestic space that Aziz "feminizes"
(Goodyear 143). Aziz's following dismissal of "put her away,
she is of no importance, she is dead'" (Forster 107) does not
take away from the fact that the ghost of the invisible woman
lingers between them to demand "the necessary deferral of
desire" (Goodyear 141). This barrier between Aziz and Fielding
foments once he discovers that Fielding has taken a wife.

According to Sara Suleri, "The violence of sexual power

that Forster associates with the composition of A Passage to
QExploratiollli 2015 39

India manifests itself in the text as both an engagement with and

a denial of a colonial homoerotic imperative" (147). It is within
this denial that the woman is relegated to the role of a silhouette
containing "constraints upon the operation of autonomous
desires" (148) for male narratives. As the woman interrupts this
discourse into which she cannot be subsumed entirely, so does
the oriental space.

What dominates the discourse is an interruption by

space, even as the novel concludes, of this homoerotic
interaction and attempt at union: "But the horses didn't want it-
they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it. ..the birds, the
carrion ... they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet,' and
the sky said, 'No, not there'" (Forster 306). It reinforces the
sundering of Britain from the Orient, which is "destined to bear
its foreignness as a mark of its permanent estrangement from
the West." This estrangement is "inscribed in the woman who
enters the caves and returns speaking rape" and the space that
swerves them away from each other (Silver 16).

Against all the heterogeneous narratives at play is our

final narrative, which brings together a collision between
nationalism and imperialism over the freedom of the Orient;
that very freedom, the novel argues, is only possible with the
freedom of the woman. Struggling against "the net Great Britain
had thrown over India" (Forster 14), Aziz speaks for the Indian
males as he argues to dismantle the purdah, or veil: "His poems
were all on one topic - oriental womanhood. The purdah must
go' was their burden, 'otherwise we shall never be free'"
(Forster 279). Meyda Yegenoglu stresses that "in the battle
between nationalism and imperialism, it is the question of
woman which is 'doubly in shadow'" (122). The discussions
concerning nationalism all revolve around concerns raised by
Hamidullah Begum: "Wedlock, motherhood, power in the
house" (Forster 12) and education of citizens - such that the
woman's part is central to the rise of the nation. There is an
emphasis on "the emancipation of women as an indispensable
precondition for the nation's civilization" (Yegenoglu 127),
which means replacing the purdah that Aziz himself rails
against, for "religion ... was held responsible for keeping women
(!Explorations 2015 40

in the dark ages" (Yegenoglu 128). Male identity, be it

imperialistic or nationalistic, now depends on the female and
feminine space. As the men crow over possession, what remains
in the shadows here is the woman herself, corresponded by the
silence of Indian geography: "Over much of India the same
retreat on the part of humanity was beginning ... the sun was
returning to his kingdom with power but without beauty ... he
was merely a creature, like all the rest, and so debarred from
glory" (Forster 104-5).

Essentially what has emerged is an archive across a

three-century trajectory that ferments and perpetuates a
discourse of performance by the oriental space and woman. In
doing so, it establishes the authority and identity of the figure
that gazes upon them. Turkish Embassy Letters, Flaubert in
Egypt and A Passage to India mark a transformation in the
corresponding narratives of native space and woman, based on
the historical circumstances of the time. Across the eighteenth,
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is a transition from
discovery, admiration and eroticization, to objectification and
possession, concluding with incoherence and imposed silence.
The silence that reigns is itself convoluted, for these narratives
are perceived as threats or necessities "for the male discourse of
homoeroticism and nationalism. What is significant to note is
how, even as the dual narratives of oriental space and woman
perform to create the identity of the occidental - with Forster,
the native male - these narratives contradict the common idea
that the subaltern's narrative is solely one of silence. It is,
instead, through the narratives of the supposedly subsumed and
colonized that the Western identity is possible at all. The
rhetoric develops as a heterogeneous archive that empowers the
Oriental woman and space, even as it registers their withdrawal
behind a figurative veil by the twentieth century.
Q!:xplorations' 2015 41

Works Cited

Behdad, Ali. "Orientalist Desire, Desire of the Orient." French

Forum [Link] of Nebraska Press (January

1990). Print.

Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour. Edited by Francis

Steegmuller. Penguin Books (1996). Print.

Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. Penguin Books (2005).Print.

Goodyear, Sara Suleri. The Rhetoric of English India.

University of Chicago Press, London (August 2013).

Print.

Hassan, Narin. "Authorizing Access/Sustaining Desire:

Montagu's Visible Harem." Public 16. Special Issue:

Entangled Territories. Imagining the Orient, ed. Deborah

Root and Walid Ra'ad. Print.

Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms.

Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London (1991).

Print.

Lowe, Lisa. "The Orient as Woman in Flaubert's 'Salammb6'

and 'Voyage en Orient.'" Comparative Literature

Studies 23.1 (1986), Penn State University Press. Print.

Montague, Mary W. The Turkish Embassy Letters. Broadview

Editions. Print.

Silver, Brenda R. "Periphrasis, Power, and Rape in A Passage

(/fxplorations 2015 42

to India. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 22.1, Duke

University Press (Autumn 1988). Print.

Yegenoglu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist

Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge University Press.

(30 April 1998). Print.
~xplorationll' 2015 43

Problema tics of Environmental Vision in Cave Birds

(1978): A Study of Ted Hughes' Ideological Overtones
Dr. Rajbir Parashar

Abstract

The environmental vision of Ted Hughes in Cave

Birds (1978) demands a close examination of his
poetic and ideological strategies. In order to
achieve the selFsufficiency of his alternative view
of the world, Hughes attempts to reinvent his own
worldview in Cave Birds (1978). It is marked by
the internal dynamics of his problematic readings
of modern culture. Overtly, the poetic sequence
progresses in its mythopoeic mode. However,
along with it Hughes's intense awareness of
environmental crisis is never absent. His vision of
ecological balance is radical in the sense that he is
opposed to the view that since environmental
degradation has been caused by science and
modernity, any viable solutions also lie therein.
Ted Hughes is for making a definite exit from
modern ways of living- both internal and external
to humankind. The fate of the persona in Cave
Birds depends upon the ambivalently benevolent
force of Nature and its workings. Death and birth,
violence and peace, are treated and trusted as
indivisible and unavoidable. This poetic sequence
defamiliarizes the moral and spiritual crisis of
Western culture by placing the materiality of
Mother Earth or Nature at the center. The
environmental vision of the poet is ingrained m
imaginative, spiritual and mythical sources.

Ted Hughes envisions a major advancement in his

spiritual exploration in Cave Birds (1978). This popular but
complex set of poems accompanied by Leonard Baskin's
paintings, has an inherent unity of purpose. The main endeavor
of the poet is towards the identification of a new kind of
explorations 2015

spiritual SOUIre. As it is foregrounded in the comse of the poetic

sequence, it [Link] the conventional images of religion"
regeneration and subjloctive redemption. The poet's attitude
towards the moral and philosophical foundations of the modem
world is revealed through the paradoxical situations and
statements that occur in richly symbolic contexts. The ovenill
mood of Cave Birds is distinct as compared with other wow of
Ted [Link]. As the title conveys, these poems are about "birds'
but only apparently as the symbolic overtones are structw:al
immediate and deep in the dIaracteT of the poems. The [Link]
impression the reader gets is that an internal drama of
tIansfonnation is being enacted. Critics have rightly observed
that Ted [Link] in Cawe Birds intends to defamiliarize the
recurrent theme of hnmankind-natnre relationship with the
symbolic "Green Modler' gradually emerging to reclaim and
tIansfonn the internal and extemal realm of natnre. In a letter to
Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford" Ted. Hughes saici that C€cIve-
Birds was primarily about "the psychological crime" punishment
and compensation of Socrntes' (1981: 260). But fuis poetic
sequence which has an internal continuity of thought and wision
actually deals with the "Socratic crime" only apparently. The
central figure of the drama registers itsJher presence when the
contradictory journey begins to foreground the goddess of
Nature - a reality or a thought with definite :specifications of
environmental awareness.

Cave Birds begins with a note of spiritual exploration

within a subjective contexL Without divorcing the subjective
from the collective, Ted Hughes builds a common plain of
symbolic narration of experience and its intricate dynamics. The
pasooa in "The Scream', "After the first Fright', "In These
Fading Moments I Wanted to Say', "'The ACOlSCd'and "FII'St,
the Doubtful Charts of Skin', clearly betrays the moral order of
instrumental rationality and cultural modernism.. With "The
Scream' Ted Hughes introduces the spiritual anxieties of Owe
Birds. It begins like this: "There was the sun on the wall - my
childhood'slNmsery picture!And there my gravestoneJShared
my dreams, and ate and drank with me happily! All day the
hawk perfected its craftsmanship/And even through the night
the miracle persisted' (Three Books 65, all subsequent textual
 45

quotes also from TH). But this apparent tone of empathy with
the surroundings is quite half-hearted. The persona is pleased
that the wonos in the "ground were doing a good job' (65).
When he sees the "inane weigJd:sof iron ! That come suddenly
crashing into people, out of nowhere' (65), the indifference
towards external landscape of natural elements remains stable.
The character of the pleasure here is not a form of empathy with
nature in its totality. It is on such occasions, when he has vivid
glimpses of senseless violence in the universe, the persona feels
"brave and creaturely' (65). This persona. Stuart Hirschberg
observes, is "flamboyant yet enclosed" outwardly magmfieent
yet inwaIdly constricted. his arrogance translates itself into
moral insensitivity' (165). Thus, the persona who represents the
mornl order of the modem world is totally devoid of the basic
humility and sensitiveness that show a genuinely human
relationship with the surrounding world. The "self-satisfied
cosmic generniization' which asserts its supremacy over the
human as well as non-human world is an mst:mce of narrow
humanism (Gifford and Roberts 205). The "1' of "The Scream'
becomes an accused in "The Accused'. Emphatically asserting
that the persona"s outlook is a crime deserving severe
punEshment, this poem implicitly contends that rationality is a
vicious. inst:rument that suppresses the unconscious and natural
drives. That is why, the accused has to accept that his body is a
"gripfu1of daggers' (16) - whose sole purpose is to homogenize
the 'non-I' world. The tone of the poem assumes larger
proportions: "And his hard life -lust - the blind!Swan of
[Link] his hard brain - sacred assassin'(l6). These
are the lines where the poet"s discontentment with the patterns
of life and experience associated with the Enlightenment
humanism is expressed with aggressive overtones. Ted Hughes'
main contention ill 'The Scream' and 'The Accused', as Keith
Sagar observes ill a different context, is: "Humanism is the
racial equivaleJ!llof solipsism. It COilSlgDs the human race to a
[Link], completely insulated capsule, as in Beckett's lhe Lost
Ones'. It hubristically assumes in the face of all the evidence
that the human race is self-sufficient, that such powers as they
are outside the human world can be safely either exploited or
ignored'( 2(9). Such a value-system, Ted [Link], is a
QExplorationll' 2015 46

kind of 'blood-aberration' with its 'atoms' which are 'annealed,

as in X-rays' (76). These poems indicate that the spiritual
transformation of the persona as variously envisaged by the poet
at different stages of the poetic growth cannot coexist with the
general moral order of the highly industrialized and
scientifically truth-pursuing Western society.

'First, The Doubtful Charts of Skin' and 'In These

Fading Moments I Wanted to Say' extend this spiritual
quietude. These poems also mark subtle variations in the tone of
the speaking voice. The persona, as his rationalist and humanist
outlook demands, is quite determined to avoid any actual
affinity with the non-human universe and the non-rational part
of his own consciousness. In 'In These Fading Moments I
Wanted to Say,' irony emanates from the falsity of the persona's
humble assertions. The amalgamation of the modem and natural
constantly exposes the gulf that the persona claims to have
overcome.

How I cry unutterable outcry

Reading the newspaper and smell of stale refuse

How I just let the excess delight

Spill out of my eyes, as I walk along

How imbecile innocent I am. (73)

The narrator-persona claims to be sensitively alive and

attuned to some 'perfect stranger's maiming' or a 'dusty dead
sparrow's eye'. The concluding lines of the poem witness the
speaker's increasing obsession with his own perceptions of the
external reality. The earlier emphatic tone gives way to a
detached and emotionally unexcited description. The inherent
irony in the evolution of the persona's attitude and claims
awakens the reader to the fact that the apparent assertions are
basically 'desperate exaggerations that betray their own falsity'
(Gifford and Roberts 211).The 'fading moments' of the previous
poem attain a new but ambivalently regenerative character in
'First, the Doubtful Charts of Skin'; 'I came to loose bones/on a
Q1;xplorationll 2015 47

heathery moor, and a rootless Church' (77). There are no overt

claims but a daring confrontation and acceptance of a new
reality, which, as implied in the 'blowing tails and manes' of
wild horses, is nothing but his own suppressed unconscious.
That is why, his 'finding weapons in his own grave suggests
that he must discover his own subjection to death and that this
knowledge strengthens his life' (Gifford and Roberts 213). But
this 'death' is essentially metaphorical. The whole cultural order
comprising the achievements of Enlightenment heritage is
finally at stake.

The Ideological temper of Cave Birds marks a tum for

alternative 'green' conscious in poems like 'The Summoner',
'The Interrogator', 'The Judge', 'The Plaintiff' and 'The
Executioner'. These poems mainly muster signs of the
character and workings of a new spiritual force imbued with
futuristic concerns of ecological relevance. Its various forms
include a female figure, some mysterious birds and the earth
itself. While some poems bring out its intrinsically violent and
authoritarian nature, others concentrate mainly upon its
regenerative potential. The underlying irony in the title, as well
as the structure of some of these poems, also reveals the poet's
attitude towards the moral and intellectual orientation of the
persona. Most of these poems are in third-person narrative
mode. But the regeneration of the persona is dependent upon the
ambivalent benevolence of this force in whose mode of working
death and birth, violence and peace are simply indivisible and
unavoidable, both as means and consequences. 'The
Summoner', 'The Interrogator', 'The Judge' and 'The Baptist'
mainly scrutinize the claims and counter-claims made in their
own behalf by the conflicting voices of the drama. 'The
Summoner' establishes the identity of an apparently 'gangster
protectionist, a sinister protector, who sooner or later will
demand his dues' (Gifford and Roberts 206).

Spectral, gigantified,

Protozoic, blood-eating

The carapace
C~2015

Of foreclosure

The cuticle

of final am:st. (61)

Interestingly, "The SUiIIIi'KIDel" and "The Intenogator'

are [Link] use of judicial vocabulary in the title invens the
prevailing and dominant views of crime and ptmisbment -
negation of nature being the severest crime. In 'The
Inteuogator' , as Stuart Hirschberg relates, the "intellectual
scrutiny of the victim is as merciless as the sun beating down on
a cmpse left for vultures in the desert' (Hirschberg 154). The
inteuogator is a bird: The bini is the sun's key holelfhe sun
spies through. Throutgb herHle I"3JJS3Cks the camouflage of
hunger'(69). This metaphorianl bird is the "blood-louse of
Ether'. It is troubled by some "angered righteous questiODS' and
is quite unmistakable with "her eye on the probe' (69).
Interrogated by such a figure" the assertive and complacent
protagonist of 'The Scream' is "as helpless as a skin-and-bone
mule; tIying to hide in a desert, but betrayed by the black
shadow of its own iIllescapable physicality' (Sagar 114). 'The
Judge' and 'The Haptisl' are obscure variations on the
preceding figures. Enjoying a "Cosmic equipoise', the judge is a
"hero of the unalterable" (11). Ted Hughes seems to contend
that the persona has to admit and accept the "guilt and sentence'
that his humanist and ratioruilist outlook invite for him from the
forces of nature which get disturbed and annoyed by the
wmkings of these despiritualized tendencies (Sagar 115).

"After There Was Nothing Came a Woman' and "Bride

and Groom lie Hidden fOIrThree Days' mad. the culminatiou
of the internal dramal of Ctwe Birds. While releb:raiIDg the
persona's wholeness of being" both these poems subvert modem
world's preoccupatiOlll mili the rationalistic modes of cognition.
The poet in -After There was: Nothing Came a Woman' overtly
dramatizes "the re-emergence of Nature as the Great Goddess of
mankind" and the Mo11herof all life" (Faas 181). Here 'she' is a
mocIest version of me mysterious female figures; in Ted
Hughes's earlier poetry.
 49

She looks at the grass trembling among the worn stones

Having about as much comprehension as a Lamb

Who :stares at everything simultaneously

With ant-like head and soldierly bearing

She had made it but only just, just (93)

The poem" like the whole of Cave Birds, is essentially

woding at a symbolic level. The narrator who begins with the
pretensions of a detached and calm commentator on the
~ in the objective world, as implied in the tone of !.he
last lines, finally senses mystery and immensity in the actions
and appearance of 'She'. The use of lamb and ant imagery for
highlighting her innocence and distance from what: is imagined
to be the corrupted and decaying world of civilized 3lIld Iatioru!l
man indirectly assert:s the oontmuoo primacy of the irnIIiomd
and instinctual mode of existence m the poet's world-view. But
as contrasted with this fantastic but emphatic revival of
primitivism in symbolic tenns, in "Bridge and Groom', the poet
mainly displays the physical union of the protagonist-lover with
his beloved. The meanings are varied and deep : "She inlays
with deep-cuts scrolls the nape of his neck !He sinks into place
the inside of her thigb:slSo, gasping wilh joy, with cries of
wonderment /Like two gods of mudfSprawling in the dirt" but
with infinite careJThey bring each other to perfection' (98). The
imagery of sexual union reminds the reader of Gaudete. But the
CODSUIIUllation of physical union actually carries within it a
spiritual renewal and the most authentic expression of the
'phallic reality' which as implied in the ritualistic episodes of
Gtmdete, is merely a reflection of the highest form of
consciousness. Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford observe: "Sexual
union is a metaphor for wholeness of being and oneness with
the world; it is also both a cause and a consequence of
wholeness and unity' (1981: 226). In "Bride and Groom' the
way Ted Hughes brings the "moment closest to extinction turns
out to be the creative moment' (Faas 193).
 QExploratious 2015 50

In Cave Birds, 'She Seemed So Considerate' and 'The

Green Mother' take forward the internal drama and overall
vision of the sequence. These poems highlight the transforming
capabilities of the mysterious and regenerative 'female' figure.
The incantation tone of the priestly voice constantly endows a
mystic and visionary character to these poems. The plaintiff
refers to the 'life-divining bush of your desert' and the 'heavy-
fruited, burning tree/of your darkness' (72). The protagonist is
left with the only option of listening to his own fate: 'Buried in
your chest, a humbling weight/That will not let you
breathe./Y our heart's winged flower /Come to supplant you'
(72). The revival of the 'heart's winged flower' which is
essentially the suppressed non-rational and uncivilized principle
of the protagonist's existence, is quite skillfully symbolized in
'She Seemed So Considerate'. It is a first person narrative. In
boththese poems, the unconscious which makes the individual
feel at one with nature in its wild processes comes to the fore.
Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford also point out: 'Hitherto
imprisoned in the darkness of the self unacknowledged by the
protagonist, it has been roused by the trial' (45). In the latter
poem, the persona is gradually overwhelmed by the paradoxical
arguments of the bird-like deity: 'Then the bird came /She said:
'Your world has died' / It sounded dramatic' (70). However, it is
confirmed when: 'But my potted pet fern, the one fellow spiriUI
stIll cherished,lIt actually had witnessed/As if Life had decided
to desert me/As if it saw more hope for itself elsewhere'(70).

'The Green Mother' and 'The Executioner' awaken the

reader to the material vastness and spiritual freshness of the
deity. The force or state of consciousness celebrated in these
poems is foreign to modem culture and subjectivities. 'The
Green Mother' reveals that the 'earth is a busy hive of
heaven'(87). This poem is primarily a celebration of the
heterogeneity of life that earth fosters. The recurrence of the
word 'heaven' in the context of flora and fauna demands a
metaphorical reading. Although in the first person narrative and
exceptionally emphatic in its convictions, the narrating voice is
initially neither of the persona nor of the female or bird-like
deity. The concept of a heaven beyond this life is apparently
rejected. The trees, flowers, birds, beasts and fish-all have their
Qfxpiorations 2015 51

own heavens, but not altogether different from the one the
persona has to strive for. The oracular voice tells him: 'These
are only some heavens/Not all within your choicelThese are
also the heavens/of your persuasion/your candled prayers have
congealed an angel, a star/a city of religions' (88). In 'Crow's
Theology', the poet has demystified religion. Against Christian
religiosity, which according to the poet, has suppressed 'an
angel, a star - A city of religions' (88), this poem foregrounds
the richness of life that the earth offers. But this over-emphasis
on 'earth' as the sole originator of diverse sorts of heavens is not
an affirmation of the modern conditions of life which basically
constitute the present character of this planet, but of the inherent
elements of mysticism and transcendentalism, which as
envisaged by the poet put green earth and Nature at a single
metaphysical plain of an alternative religiosity. That is why, in
'The Executioner': 'It feels like the world/before your eyes ever
opened' (75). Both these poems are primarily critiques of non-
religious humanistic orientation of modern culture. With a
definite inclination towards mystic reality of life and universe,
Ted Hughes celebrates the centrality of a non-human and
sacredly mystified 'green' source of Nature: 'Fills up/Sun,
moon, stars, he fills them uplWith his hemlocklThey darken/He
fills up the evening and the morning, they darken/He fills up the
sea'(75). Commenting upon this poem, Keith Sagar maintains
that 'there is no cruelty in this hemlock execution rather a
benediction' (l76).But this filling up and darkening, even if it
gives a rich sense of fullness to the persona in the poem, cannot
legitimately be described as benediction. The executioner is
essentially a personification of the 'elemental power circuit of
the universe' which cannot co-exist with the rationalistic and
humanistic patterns of modern life and thought. The main
achievement of Ted Hughes in Cave Birds is the use of different
strategies that help foregrounding 'green' consciousness of the
poet as reflected in the transformation of the persona in this
poetic drama. It is noteworthy that the imagery of these poems
is directed towards this new awareness - the 'Socratic' psyche
becomes a subsidiary to the imaginative union with Nature in its
latest ideological manifestations.
QExplorations 2015 52

Works Cited
Three Books (Cave Birds, Remains of Elmei, River), London:

Faber & Faber, 1993.

Sagar, Keith (1975, second edition 1978) The Art of Ted

Hughes, Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press.

Gifford, Terry and Neil Roberts (1981) Ted Hughes: A Critical

Study, London: Faber & Faber.

Faas, Egbert (1980) The Unaccommodated Universe, Santa

Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press.

Hirschberg, Stuart (1981) 'Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes

Dublin:Wolf-hound Press.
Qfxplorations 2015 53

Paralingual Mode of Expression in Sylvia Plath's

"Ariel" & Bee Poems
Sadia Maq bool

Abstract

This paper aims at highlighting a distinctive

feature of Sylvia Plath's verse, that is her adept
use of kinetic imagery and connotative gestures,
which help to explicate her basic intent. Since she
finds language too contaminated to serve as an
effective medium, her dependence on paralingual
means becomes even more significant. Many of the
important themes in her poetry have been conveyed
through body language. Whether it is feeling of
insecurity associated with virginity or the
rebellious flight of the queen bee becoming a red
scar and later a red comet in the sky; gestures
rather than words fully capture her underlying
message. It is this role of gestures and body
language in her poetry that will be explicated in
this paper.

The general belief about language as a transparent

medium for conveying an individual's perception and
interpretation of reality helped academics neatly sidestep
various disturbing issues. These included issues like the
relationship between the dominant and mLlted culture; the
possibility/ impossibility of minor critical discourse to develop
its own indigenous history and critical canons, instead of always
being measured and judged by pre-existing dominant authority;
and ultimately, the credibility and impartiality of the principles
by and for the dominant group later arbitrarily being applied to
the muted group. It was feminist theory that brought such
questions to light. The myth about the impartiality and
transparency of language was exploded by feminism. Catherine
Belsey in the introduction to 'The Feminist Reader' observes
(!fxplorations 2015 S4

'language doesn't merely name male superiority, it produces it.

The tendency of words to seem transparent, to appear simply to
label a pre-existing reality, indicated to feminists the crucial
role of language in construction of a world picture which
legitimates the existing patriarchal order' (Belsey 4).

A writer expresses his/her intentions not only through

the thematic contents aided by subversive linguistic techniques
like sarcastic innuendoes and ironic intonations, but also
through the gestures and body language of the personal
characters presented in a poem! play. The very way in which a
persona behaves or is expected to behave by others around
herlhim, hislher body movements, the roles and poses slhe
adopts, and last but not the least, each one of hislher gestures,
all supplement the basic intent of a poem. The physical
language works more effectively than actual words and forms
the sub-text of a poem. The reliance on gesture without any
verbal commentary equips the poet with an added tool to
explore new dimensions.

Sylvia Plath also makes use of gestures and body actions

in order to elucidate the underlying concerns. It seems that she
finds verbal expression inadequate for her use. Language, being
subject to gender discrimination for such a long time, has
become so contaminated that she discovers it to be an unfit
medium to give an unbiased expression to her feminist
thoughts. Therefore, she heavily relies on nonverbal means to
fully capture the essence of her feelings. This preference for
gestures and nonverbal expression is quite obvious in the bee
poems. 'The Bee Meeting,' which is full of action, presents the
enigmatic bedecking of a virgin by her fellow villagers for some
special occasion. However, the details reported by the
apprehensive and bewildered virgin are so mixed up that it is
difficult to decide whether it is a bride who is being decorated
and dressed up for her bridegroom or a sacrificial virgin being
taken for some ancient ritual.

The first pose in which one sees this speaker is her semi-
naked condition in which she meets her 'gloved and covered'
fellow country folks. Her extreme discomfort, caused by this
QExp!orationll' 2015 55

state, is evident from her statement regarding her nakedness: 'I

am nude as a chicken neck.' This image is befitting not only for
her present condition but the feeling of insecurity, the repulsive
shrinking from being exposed, and her vulnerability, defined by
the very state of virginity itself.

Males have in fact propagated the concept of virginity.

By lauding this state of sexual inexperience in women, they
have not only deprived them of equal sexual freedom but also
burdened the female mind with constant fear regarding the loss
of this state. While Hardy has raised the question of the 'pure
woman' in Tess of the D' Urbervilles through thematic means,
Plath has articulated her criticism of this concept through the
physical depiction of this virgin.

The poem 'Bee Meeting' dramatizes a female stepping

into the unknown and frightening world of sexuality and her
subsequent response to this new and painful experience. But
this experience has not been presented from a single center of
consciousness and the beehive, with its clear-cut demarcation
between the virgins and the sexually experienced bee queen,
provides another set of reference to further elucidate Plath's
feminist concern.

In the bee world, virgmlty has been presented as a

better-protected and more independent state of being: 'The hive
is snug as a virgin/Sealing off its brood cells, her honey, and
quietly humming' (Plath 34-35). Nevertheless, certain parallels
are to be found between the bee and the human world. In both
cases, virginity is an ephemeral state that implies certain
innocence and a definite ignorance, as shown by the virgin bees
who think that by sealing off their hive they are safe from any
unwanted intrusion. However, this lulled sense of safety is only
temporary, as their hive is about to be penetrated whether they
allow it or not.

In spite of these similarities, the dissimilarities are more

apparent. In the human world the speaker's first step into
sexuality means pain, a sense of loss, and an overwhelming
feeling of entrapment:
qexp!orations 2015 56

I cannot run, I am rooted and the gorse hurts me

With its yellow purses, its spiky armory

I could not run without having to run forever. (31-33)

The gorse is a phallic symbol and the female, in spite of

experiencing pain, feels imprisoned within the hurtful snare of
sexuality. She is also aware of the bitter fact that her future life
is going to be synonymous with pain and misery, but if she tries
to flee one painful situation this vicious circle will be repeated
throughout her life.

Sexual life in the bee world is equivalent to movement,

freedom and ultimate victory through experience:

While in their finger joint cells the new virgins

Dream of a duel they will win inevitably

A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight

The uplift of the murderess into a heaven that loves her

(45-48)

Contrary to the 'spiky armory' of gorse that means pain

and hurt for the virgin, the virgin bee is going to dominate and
ultimately oust her male partner in their sexual encounter. In the
bee world, it is the drone, the male partner, who loses his life
once the act is consummated- hence the title 'murderess.' The
virgin bee is found to be superior to a human female because
the very environment she lives in and the scheme of nature both
side with her (a heaven that loves her), while in the human
world the woman finds herself entrapped: 'By a sky !Palely and
flamily/ Igniting its carbon monoxide.'(51)

This contrast between their lives and the very nature of

their sexual exposure has been presented through gestures and
actions. Where this initiatory step for the virgin bee means a
liberating flight from the dark, constricting brood cells into
heaven itself, for a girl it means the loss of freedom and
subsequent bondage: if she tries to gain liberty from this
<!Exploration~2015 57

weighty yoke, like a runway prisoner, the other alternative is an

unending search for refuge met with one betrayal after another.
The second pose in which this speaker imagines herself is that
of a magician's girl: 'I am exhaustedlPillar of white in a
blackout of knives/ I am the magician's girl who does not
flinch.' (51-53)

This pose is symbolic and speaks volumes about the

derogatory and secondary status awarded to women. The
constant fear of exposure before the magician's knife, again a
phallic symbol, marks the psyche of this girl. She must silently
and unflinchingly look at the dangerous game that may claim
her life any moment. In spite of being the central character of
this show, exposed to the utmost risk, she is not permitted to
have a say in the ploy.

During the whole show it is the magiCian who holds

attention, doing the talk and maneuvering things, while the
magician's girl is relegated to a secondary status. She is present
at the back of the stage, silently smiling without having a say in
the whole proceeding. All applause, all praise is reserved for the
intelligence and expertise of the male magician and this girl
who exposes herself to the greatest danger is often neglected by
the audience. She is introduced only as a decorative accessory
or a helping hand that obeys and does her master's biding,
handing him various things, adjusting his apparatus or smilingly
lying under his threatening knife. This whole sub-text has been
suggested by the single pose in which the persona imagines
herself.

Nevertheless, she is also aware of the fact that adherence

to this stance for long will sap all her vitality, as she feels
exhausted towards the end. By constantly remaining in this state
of anticipation, fear and anxiety, she has almost lost interest in
the course her life takes. 'Led through' the maze of existence by
someone else, she is completely disoriented and has become
almost oblivious to the activities carried out before her very
eyes. It is with a sudden and startled jolt that she notices the
whole ceremony was in fact only a prelude to her own death.
QExplorations 2015 58

'The Arrival of The Bee Box' again presents the

inquisitive gestures of a female who having ordered a bee box,
is appalled by the furious din it makes. Her simultaneous
repulsion and attraction towards this box is obvious from her
body language: 'I have to live with it overnight! and I can't
keep away from it.' (Plath 7-8) Typical curiosity is reflected in
every gesture of this speaker. Though she is frightened by the
noise these bees make and is also conscious of the danger, she
puts herself into by remaining close to the box; the urge to
know is so overpowering that it makes her ignore all possible
dangers. Unable to satisfy her curiosity by outwardly examining
the box, the persona says: 'I put my eye to the grid.' (11) What
this box contains is overwhelmingly 'dark, dark.' It is not only
the physical darkness that her eyes detect inside, but also the
moral and cultural darkness. Having been exploited, she has an
instinctive affinity with other victims of exploitation. It is
because of this empathy that she has been afforded a peep into
the annals of history itself and becomes aware of 'the swarmy
feeling of African hands/Minute and shrunk for export.' (13-14)

But a woman cannot be satisfied with just a peep. She

must also hear what is being said inside: 'laid my ear to furious
LatiniI am not a Caesar' (21-22). This physical move reminds
her of another exploitative dictator from history but her
instinctive response towards him is to disavow any link, any
affinity with him. However, the next imagined movement, 'If I
just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree' (28),
takes one further back into ancient history and reminds one of
another sad example of exploitation- this time the sexual
exploitation of a defenseless girl by a lascivious male. Apollo,
the sun god, felt attracted to the beautiful wood nymph Daphne.
She, however, was not enamored with him, so using her right to
choose, she did not encourage his amorous advances. But a
male cannot be dissuaded from the object of his desire so easily;
one day, finding the circumstances favorable, he chased her
across the jungle to capture and rape her. When Daphne saw
that she would not be able to save herself from his ravishing
embrace, in desperation she prayed to Zeus to turn her into a
tree- a fate preferable to being sexually molested by an
undesirable male. Such miraculous transformation was possible
Qfxplorations 2015 59

only in ancient times; now the female can only change her
outwardly appearance. The inner vitality, the essence of her
being has been sapped, as she sadly draws attention to her rather
awkward physical appearance, 'In my moon suit and my funeral
veilJI am no source of honey.' (32-33)

'Stings,' which can also be called a brief and compact

drama in its own right, hints at a number of themes through the
actions and gestures of the characters introduced therein. 'Bare
handed, I hand the comb!The man in white smiles, bare-
handed.' The daring spirit of this speaker is evident from her
very first act when without any protective glove or covering,
she decides to hold the honeycomb in her bare hands. The bee
man smiles, as he seems to be rather amused by this unique
show of courage by a woman, since what is expected of a
woman is fear, timidity and compliance with the conventional
model.

The actions of this speaker show a split within the

psyche. Part of herself complies with traditional expectations.
Like an ordinary housewife, happy and content with her house
chores, she enamels the hive 'Thinking sweetness, sweetness.'
But the other half of her personality revolts against the
demeaning sort of life as she remembers her past life with
bitterness: 'I am no drudgerrhough for years I have eaten dust?
And dried plates with my dense hair' (34). This act of drying
plates with 'dense hair' has deep undercurrents. Hair has always
been associated with fertility, life force and sexual potential.
However, this misuse of hair shows the wrongly channeled
sexuality of women in wedlock. Marriage, instead of
sublimating women's sexual potential, proves a drain for their
vitality. The humiliating role etched for women as housewives
with its demeaning and thankless chores has subtly been hinted
at through the symbolic acts of 'eating dust' and 'drying plates
with dense hair.' Housewives usually devote their whole lives
to tending domestic affairs yet their services are invariably
taken for granted and hardly ever acknowledged by the other
members of the family.
qfxploratious 2015 60

The persona, in spite of her rigorous work routine, feels

superior to the ordinary woman whom she equates with worker
bees. She identifies with the queen bee, which even after losing
the outward luster and glory, is still different from less
intellectual and less sophisticated women, due to her unique
mental approach: 'Will they hate meffhese women who only
scurrylWhose news is the open cherry, the open clover?'(35)
Butscher has interpreted these actions as referring to the crude
talk of Plath's rural neighbors in Devon, 'Open thighs, open
bodies, internal organs' - the conversational topics of her female
neighbors are castigated (Butscher 344).

People interested in beekeeping know that the queen

bee's life is riddled with paradoxes. Though she is the central
source of procreation and productivity, ensuring the continuity
of hive life, she has to give up a lot of other activities in order to
keep up this status. Except during the bride flight she does not
see day-light, she has no say in the major decisions of apiary
such as swarming, collection of nectar, defending the hive
against any possible intrusion, and sometimes matters
concerning her own life and death. Thus she becomes
appropriate symbol for a housewife who in spite of being a
backbone of her household, a means of production and
nurturance of life, literally becomes the prisoner of the whole
set-up. This parallel between the women and bees continues
throughout the poem and next it is the hive itself that has been
described in human terms: 'Opening in spring, like an
industrious virginffo scour the creaming crests/As the moon for
its ivory powders scours, the sea' (35-37). The image of the
women again presented through gestures in these lines,
combines the twin roles of the virgin (industrious virgin) and
the housewife (scours the crests). The moon with Diana as its
ruling deity, has also been seen as a virgin who in order to
enhance her beauty needs the ocean's light reflecting help.
These comparisons also show that the speaker still relies on
traditional actions and gestures, as she has not attained complete
liberation from the bonds of orthodox thought.

If female activity, even in the bee world, has been

equated with domestic chores, the body language of men tells
~xplorationll 2015 61

another story: 'A third person is watchingl ... Now he is gone/In

eight great bounds, a great scapegoatlHere is his slipper; here is
another' (37-41). Men are found to be deserters. They are the
ones who instead of sharing the burden of life watch distantly
and when worst comes to worst they silently depart, leaving the
woman alone to cope with the ordeal. The feminist protest
against the selfish attitude of men has been registered by
mentioning a few of their simple gestures. The 'man' in this
poem is slinking away. His legs carrying him away and his
features misshapen by the stinging bees which cling to his lips
like lies; not only reveal the male tendency of shirking
responsibility but also give voice to a bitterness a woman feels
at his show of meanness. But in 'Stings' the speaker is no
longer concerned with the issue of male irresponsibility, since
she is more interested in attaining a new identity for herself.
This new self has been delineated through physical gesture.

More terrible than she ever was, red

Scar in the sky, red comet

Over the engine that killed her-

The mausoleum, the wax house (Plath 56-60)

The sudden and the dazzling movement of the comet,

which disturbs the heavenly order aptly sums up the nature of
this revolutionary step. Likewise, "red scar in the sky" is again
redolent of the overt rejection of the older status quo. For Plath,
the sky, due to its association with a male presiding deity,
symbolizes sternness, relentlessness and rigidity. Her sudden
upward movement in the role of a self-sufficient being shows
that her new identity has caused a rupture, burnt a hole, tearing
and lacerating the conventional hierarchy by its speed,
movement and fiery energy.

Another important aspect of this physical gesture is its

simultaneous release from and rejection of previous
conventional roles reserved for women. No longer is she a
dependent virgin or a captive housewife, nor, like the moon,
needs another medium for ref!ecting its light but has become a
C1Explorations 2015 62

source of light herself-- a red comet which in a flash enlightens

the whole sky. The house, which kept the queen bee/housewife
as its prisoner for so loOng,has been left behind as she has risen
much above it. Mary Lynn Broe in the 'The Bee Sequence: But
I Have Self to Recover' states:

Queen ship is a double-bind situation where the physical

category carries with it the threat of fossilization. The
hive killed the queen by entombing her powers in its
sealed waxen brood cells. She became a narrowly
defined reproductive symbol and suffered a kind of
death-in-life, the feminocidal hazard of "specialness"
(Broe 104).

Another such leap has been presented through the

kinetic imagery of 'Ariel'. On a literal level this poem is about a
horse ride that a woman enjoys in the pre-dawn darkness, while
her horse is racing headlong towards the rising sky. But its
numerous images of movement and freedom can be accorded a
feminist interpretation as well.

The poem records a woman's breaking through the

passivity imposed on her by social norms. One has a sense of
movement, as she gathers speed in the surrounding darkness
' ...the substance less bluelPour of tor and distances' (2-3). But
this journey forward is not a blind leap taken into the dark, it is
a definite, guided action; like the flight of an arrow, which is a
shot from a definite spot, heading towards a certain target. This
swift, arrow-like flight takes her through and out of the male -
dominated world. As she rushes through the old conventions on
her journey forward, "Hooks' impede her progress. These hooks
symbolize various hurdles she comes across and needs to master
before she can break free from the orthodox order. The dark
'shadows' cast by these hooks hint to their sinister effect upon a
woman's life. It is to escape from their lethal shade, and have a
clearer view of the world around her that she is heading towards
'the red eye' of morning. This union has been dramatized by the
obsessive 'I' sounds in the last three stanzas, which 'connect the
personal pronoun (I/white/Godiva) to both action (flies/drive)
and its ultimate, obliterating end (suicidal, red/eye). Person, act
QExplorations 2015 63

and end are swept into one driving force by the poet's aural
strategy' (McKay 20).
Thus 'Ariel' can be categorized as a poem that presents
a readjustment of the values of life. A woman, after living too
long under the restricting shadows of patriarchal canons and
customs decides to cast off this gloomy shroud entwining her
existence and takes a hazardous journey towards a new mom, a
morning full of light, that will dispel the old gloom and enable
her to look at things with fresh eyes. The reference to 'Godiva'
with whom the speaker identifies holds great significance. It not
only serves to place a certain distance between the poet and the
persona but it also draws the reader's attention to the poem's
feminist intent.
Godiva, a woman who rode naked through the streets of
the town in order to relieve it of an unjust tax is a prototype
female figure of defiance, revolt and ultimately sacrifice. By
taking this decision to expose herself before the eyes of the
whole town she had not only taken a bold step of defiance but
also one that involved sacrifice. Since, by this single gesture she
cast off her repute, her grace and lastly her respectable lady-like
image. By identifying with this historical figure, the Plath's
speaker is highlighting the sacrificial aspect of her gesture. She
knows that by casting off the 'dead hands, dead stringencies' of
past traditions, she is taking a 'suicidal' step, like the dew flying
straight into the 'cauldron of morning'. Yet at the same time it
is also an act of freedom, an unpeeling of the older self though
the process cost her, her life.

The speaker intends to assume a new identity and this

new self has been described in terms of a phallic symbol, an
arrow flying into the cauldron. The very choice of this symbol
for a female is significant and shows a complete rejection of
older conventions. Traditionally, movement, energy and the
right to explore are reserved for males who are therefore,
assigned the symbols of arrow and knife, while a female's life is
invariably linked with the household, rootedness and hence
static. The same dichotomy has been hinted at in Plath's novel
The Bell Jar where a male chauvinist describes the difference
 QExploratioml' 2015 64

between male and female nature in this way: 'What a man is an

arrow into the future and what a woman is the place the arrow
shoots off from. ' (Plath 80) It is precisely this contrast from their
assigned roles, which awards mobility and freedom to one and
relegates the other gender to an inert status that has been
questioned by Plath. By allowing the female rider, the speed
and mobility of an arrow she has turned the conventional
hierarchy completely topsy-turvy.

The selection of an arrow as an image to depict this bold

step of revolt is also appropriate in the sense that it fully
captures its true spirit. This poem reflects an intellectual rather
than a physical revolt. Physically the poet has merely written a
poem that is only a means of giving vent to her rebellious
thoughts, which provide the basic impetus. But the speed of her
reflections, the agility of her response to the existing order, and
subsequent effect this poem is going to make on the emotions of
its readers - all have been encapsulated within this single but
powerful image of a flying arrow.

For Plath Movement, flight and escape are not the only
gestures through which a woman may cope with the ordeals of
life but she has also investigated the worth of passivity with the
gestures of defiance. It is 'wintering', the one observes that one
observes how the bees pass through the trying months of
winters by dint of their determination, solidarity and patient
wait for spring. The process of wintering involves the double
challenge for the bees since they have not only been exposed to
the natural threat of winter in the form of its freezing cold but
also deprived of the honey; their sole means of subsistence by
the human beings. Thus, incapacitated both physically and
materially it is only through a strong feeling of mutual solidarity
that they are able to subsist.

Their positive qualities of patience, unity, determination,

forbearance in the face of suffering and death have again been
presented through their action. The speaker imprisoned within
her house due to harsh winter season, is compelled to live with
these bees, which to her represent a feminine force as she says,
'The bees are all women', who 'have got rid of the men'(22).
Qfxploratiomi 2015 65

Cheated out of the fruit of their labour in the most arduous

season of year, they teach her a new lesson of endurance
through passivity.

The first gesture that attracts the attention of their slow

yet disciplined approach for Lyle and Tate, which they have
been provided with as a replacement for their honey, is 'Filing
like soldiers/ To the syrup tin' (24-25). Like the phallic image
in 'Ariel', soldierly qualities like determination, hard-work and
survival under unsuitable circumstances - qualities thought to be
prerogatives of males have been accorded to these women.
Deprived of any possibility for decisive action due to extreme
cold, they can express their anger through a gesture of potential
threat. 'Now they ball in a masslBlack/Mind against the White'
(31-33). This pose of uniting the shape of a poisonous and
deadly black ball against their assailants is symbolic of their
unity and self-defensive impulse. Though severely restricted
and incapacitated by the ravages of winter, they still express
their resilient spirit through a gesture of solidarity as: 'The
smile of snow is white / .... .Into which, on warm dayslThey can
only carry their dead' (34-37). Even death has failed to separate
them or to breach their unity. Their affinity with each other is
something beyond the bounds of life and death; hence, their
gestures of reverence for their dead mates.

Emotions expressed through various gestures of these

bees bring the speaker to her final conclusion that, 'Winter is
for women--- / The woman still at her knitting / --- / Her body a
bulb in the cold, too dumb to think' (42-45). The final image is
also a kinetic one, where the physical posture tells the whole
story. The lonesome story of a silent woman, by her fireside
completely engrossed in her knitting becomes symbolic figure
for the strength and fortitude of the whole womanhood.
Deserted and left alone, to face the trials of nature, she tries to
forget the wrongs done to her by concentrating on her
handwork. It is only through endurance and depending upon her
physical reserves (Her body a bulb in cold) that she is able to
subsist through this strenuous phase of life.
<fxplorations 2015 66

This detailed study of Plath's poetry shows the various

means and techniques she has employed to give expression to
her feminist concerns. She has not only pointed out the biased
attitude of society which results in maltreatment and
objectification of women, but through her use of kinetic
imagery has also shown the alternative ways of dealing with
this dilemma. While poems like 'Ariel', 'Stings', and 'Purdah'
advocates an overt flouting of traditional restrictions, one must
also keep in mind 'The courage of Shutting Up' and
'Wintering' which highlight the greater worth of silence,
endurance and subsistence under most trying conditions.

Works Cited

Belsey, Catherine & Jane Moore, "Introduction: The Story So

Far". The Feminist Reader. Eds. London: Macmillan,
1997. Print.

Broe, Mary Lynn. "The Bee Sequence: But I Have A Self to

Recover". Sylvia Plath: Modern Critical Views. Ed.
Harold Bloom. NY: Chel!>ea,1989. Print.

Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. NY: Sea

Bury P, 1976. Print.
McKay., D.F. "Aspects of Energy in the poetry of Dylan
Thomas and Sylvia Plath". Sylvia Plath: Modern
Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. NY: Chelsea, 1989.
Print.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber & Faber, 1966. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New

York: Harper &Row, 1981. Print.
<!explorations 2015 67

Metaphysical Overtones in Acceptance of Suffering in

Eugene O'Neill's Tragic Characters

Maryam Inaam & Irfan Randhawa

Abstract

Eugene 0 'Neill has always tried to bring to light

individuality and intensity as the permanent
features of his characters. The suffering his
characters go through is not only physical but
marks their elevation to a higher metaphysical
plane. These implications of tragedy can be
observed while closely studying his characters that
are the individuals with a heroic readiness to
accept their suffering as a consequence of their
choices. This paper argues that the quest of his
characters for a metaphysical essence is satiated
only when they are cleansed through the dearth of
physical existence in order to comprehend their
actual purpose and meaning in life. In this process
they undergo a tragic experience which is
something beyond physical in terms of bearing the
odds, experiencing pain and eventually attaining
metaphysical transcendence.

The magnificence of tragedy lies in man's falling again

and again to attain the wisdom he requires to rest in solace. It
lies in the bearing of odds and to face death with dauntless and
unfaltering courage. No other term like Felix Culpa! can aptly

'Felix culpa is a [Latin] phrase that comes from the words felix (meaning
"happy," "lucky," or "blessed") and culpa (meaning "fault" or "fall"), and in
the Catholic tradition is most often translated "happy fault," Latin
expression felix culpa derives from the writings of [St. Augustine] regarding
the [Fall of Man], the source of [original sin]: "For God judged it better to
bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist." The medieval
theologian [Thomas Aquinas] cited this line when he explained how the
principle that "God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good
therefrom". In a literary context, the term "felix culpa" can describe how a
series of unfortunate events will eventually lead to a happier outcome.
l!Exploration~2015 68

define this characteristic of tragedy where man sweats his heart

out to be purged from the choices he made in life. The good
comes out of evil, the best comes out of worst, and
2
understanding comes out of hamartia . Accordingly, a man
needs to be in a state where his volitional choices bring the
drought of suffering to him. 0' Neill's idea of tragedy is
analogous to Greek and Shakespearean tragedy depicting a
man's continual effort to redeem himself by grasping the
essence of suffering. His characters understand and eventually
realize their meaning in life, which leads them to a higher
metaphysical plane. This paper makes a study of metaphysical
suffering in 0 Neill by stressing on the metaphysical overtones
of disproportionate human pairing which exhibits sheer
determination in the face of death. In order to explore this idea
it is important to define and explain the word 'metaphysical'
and the context in which it will be explored. Metaphysicality
here is interpreted in terms of Aristotelian3 essence of suffering.
Aristotle defines metaphysics as "the knowledge
of immaterial being." (Smith 60) As such, it is concerned with
explaining the features of reality that exist beyond the physical
world. It represents as meaning 'the science of things
transcending what is physical,.,,4 Consequently this Aristotelian
understanding of metaphysicality helps to formulate an exegesis
which locates the proposed 'metaphysical overtones' in 0 Neill
as the implications in the text that relate to spiritual inclination
and dwell in something beyond physical. Thus paradoxically
suggesting implications of being extraordinary in mundane;
focusing on those actions that are performed in ordinary course

(Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia)

<[Link] culpa>
2Hamartia, also called tragic flaw, (hamartia from Greek hamartanein, "to
err"), inherent defect or shortcoming in the hero of a tragedy, who is in other
respects a superior being favored by fortune. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
<[Link]
3The term relates to Aristotle or to his philosophy. (Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy) <[Link] .[Link]/entries/aristotle-Io gic/>
4 (Oxford English Dictionary}
<[Link] n ition/en gIish/metaphysics> and
(Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy)<[Link]
Q1;xploratioUl>
2015 69

of life by more than humble characters but are significantly

heroic in essence.

O'Neill's characters' premeditated indulgence in

disproportionate pairing, their consequent suffering and their
search for eventual redemption yields them to metaphysical
elevation. They move from the plane of physical excursions to
the one that is spiritually regarded as metaphysical plane. They
grasp the knowledge beyond physical limits and transcend to a
vantage ground where they show the manifestations of
metaphysical overtones in the acceptance of suffering. This idea
tends to develop, support and explain the spiritual elevation of
characters on the basis of their stoic perseverances during the
time of difficulty. This not only cleanses their souls but also
redeems them by giving spiritual consolation. Their restitution
is the outcome of the price they paid to indulge in a
disproportionate association. Since their attitude towards
suffering does not encompass any religious and predestined
elements, the metaphysical overtones are simply extracted on
the basis of these characters' choice to suffer and then to come
out of the quagmire of suffering by facing it. Therefore, it is
neither truly Greek nor essentially Shakespearean in essence. It
is rather modernistic; secular6 and mundane in character, yet
heroic.

In O'Neill's plays, the metaphysical overtones transpire

when his disproportionately joined characters comply with the
offer for self-deterioration. In his play Beyond the Horizon, the
traces of metaphysical overtones are in the suffering of Robert,
Ruth and Andrew. Robert's misinterpretation of dreams in
marrying Ruth, sacrifice made by Andrew to see his brother's
happiness and implorations of Ruth to make Robert stay,

5Endurance, sobriety, and patience explored by Stoics, a philosophical

school of Athens.
< [Link]
60ne manifestation of secularism is asserting the right to be free from
religious rule and teachings, or, in a state declared to be neutral on matters of
belief, from the imposition by government of religion or religious practices
upon its people. (Wikipedia, the Free encyclopedia)
<[Link] [Link]/wiki/Secularism>
Q!;xplorations 2015 70

erupted the lava of pain and hardship for them. Robert was
never meant for the mundane life and farmhouse; his dreams
were to discover the secrets beyond the horizon. On the
contrary, Andrew's yearnings were for Ruth and the farm. He
was as deeply rooted in farm as Robert was in hankerings of
seeing the faraway lands. The barter of Ruth and Sea made
them go into the oubliette of devastation, where the turmoil
became essential to them. Robert wishes to possess the beauty
of horizon because the sight of it promises a more lively and
refined life for him. It assures him the world beyond
constrictions and morbidity of life. He aspires to have freedom
from pain, strangulation, and sickness of this life and therefore
acknowledges his aspirations in these words, "What I want to
do now is to keep on moving so that I won't take root in one
place." (O'Neill 83) His pronouncement is indicative of his
intimations to ramble the world in search of the magnetic force
he is attracted to. His freedom, solace, felicitation lies in far off
lands and he is enthralled by the luring appeal of the horizon.
His desire to possess the beauty hidden from his eyes can be
realized by understanding the significance of these words:

Supposing I was to tell you that it's just Beauty that's

calling me, the Beauty of the far off and unknown, the
mystery and the spell of the East which lures me in the
books I've read, the need of the freedom of great wide
spaces, the joy of the wandering on and on- in quest of
the secret which is hidden over there, beyond the
horizon? (O'Neill 85)

These words describe Robert's quest to achieve the

symbol of freedom hidden in the veil of unknown. So his
yearning for life beyond horizon was the source of his spiritual
satisfaction. Robert even explains the nature of his yearning to
Ruth and shares his comfort that he feels while looking towards
the beauty of nature. This serves as a liniment to his pains: "So I
used to stare out over the fields to the hills, out there- (he points
to the horizon) and somehow after a time I'd forget any pain I
was in." (O'Neill 89) But suffering becomes essential when
Robert acquiesce to Ruth and misinterprets his longing and
solace as Ruth's love. He satisfies himself by giving a reluctant
<!Explorationl> 2015 71

justification of his decisions to stay in the farmhouse and to

terminate his excursion of three years at ship by comprehending
love of Ruth to be the ultimate comfort for him. He does not
perceive that he has bid farewell to his dreams in order to
consummate his physical relationship. His physical love makes
him ignorant of the fact that this action will lead him to a
labyrinth of failure and the resulting pain. Thus, he will not be
able to come out of the constricting walls of this entanglement,
which will strangle him to death.

I think love must have been the secret- the secret that
called to me from over the world's rim- the secret
beyond every horizon; and when I didn't come, it came
to me. (He clasps Ruth to him fiercely) oh, Ruth our
love is sweeter than any distant dream!" (O'Neill 90)

This commitment emanates him to go in the maze of

sterility, where he is deprived of the very imaginative essence
he had. He gets deeper and deeper into that web of unyielding
potential. All he is left with is destruction, his creativity leaves
him. His threshold becomes the herald of poverty, disaster and
failure. The walls of farmhouse to which he once subdued
become the presage of his dying freedom and lost sensibility:
"They're like the walls of a narrow prison yard shutting me in
from all the freedom and wonder of life." (O'Neill 126). This
realization of his debacle makes him yearn for his consolation,
which is concealed under his propensity towards horizon.
Moreover, he rediscovers that he can only achieve solace
outside the shackles of farmhouse. His true essence was in his
ramblings to discover the happiness hidden under the veil of far
off lands. But all the same, the fiasco he faces after
misconstruing his dreams does not make him quit his desire for
beauty and peace. He realizes that this suffering will polish his
essence and yield to him what he was unable to achieve through
his actions otherwise. He realizes that his physical torment will
make him trek towards the world unknown. By accepting his
physical degeneration he will be able to grasp his ascend
towards a higher plane.
 QExplorations 2015 72

All our suffering has been a test through which we had

to pass to prove ourselves worthy of a finer realization.
(Exultingly) and we did pass through it! It hasn't broken
us! And now the freedom is to come true! Don't you
see? (O'Neill 150)

He is able to envision that he must suffer to capture the

very freedom he craved for. He perceives that his fault was in
consummating his physical love and hence, he needs to face his
physical turmoil with determination to be purged out of his
physical boundaries. These implications are the reflection of
metaphysical essence. When Robert realizes that his health is
deteriorating, he does not resign rather perceives it as the solace
he had always envisioned. He submits himself to the physical
degeneration in order to elevate and grasp the knowledge, he
was unable to achieve while living a life away from imaginative
suffering. He understands that death is the only parameter to
attain eternal comfort which will unshackle him from the
restrictions of the farmhouse. He smiles and accepts it with a
patient attitude. His sobriety in the face of calamity is his
victory. His 'happy fault' makes him go beyond the profane
life. Bigsby has aptly recorded his suffering and his
metaphysical elevation in these words:"this suffering is offered
as a form of grace by the dying Robert." (52) Robert dies with
this realization but he leaves the mourners with the similar
understanding of redeeming themselves through the test of time.

(There is a pause during which he breathes heavily,

straining his eyes toward the horizon) the sun comes so
slowly. (With an ironical smile) The doctor told me to
go to the far off places- and I'd be cured. He was right.

That was always the cure for me. It's too late- for this

life- but- (in a voice which is suddenly ringing with

happiness of hope)

You mustn't feel sorry for me. Don't you see I'm happy
at last-free-free-freed from the farm- free to wander on
and on-eternally! (He raises himself on his elbow, his
<!Exploration!> 2015 73

face radiant, and points to the horizon) Look! Isn't it

beautiful beyond the hills?

I can hear the old voices calling me to come-

(Exultantly) and this time I'm going! It isn't the end. It's
a free beginning-the start of my voyage! I've won to my
trip- the right of release- beyond the horizon! Oh, you
ought to be glad-glad-for my sake! (O'Neill 167-8)

This marks the metaphysical elevation of all. Robert

leaves them with grasping the very essence of suffering and
afflictions. Andrew and Ruth, as mourners of Robert, too clasp
the quintessence of turmoil. Andrews' last words on Robert's
death signify this realization that they have to dwell to be
purged from the suffering and to emerge as heroic characters.
They need to submit in order to experience transcendence from
physical plane to metaphysical plane.

(Then he glances down at his brother and speaks

brokenly in passionate voice) Forgive me, Ruth- for his
sake- and I'll remember-(Ruth lets her hands fall from
her face and looks at him uncomprehendingly. He lifts
his eyes to hers and forces out falteringly) I-you-we've
both made a mess of things! We must try to help each
other-and- in time-we'll come to know what's right-
(Desperately) And perhaps we ... (O'Neill 168-9)

O'Neill's Desire under the Elms is yet another study of

characters thrown in the trench of devastation to suffer and
experience physical and mental deterioration in order to emerge
as metaphysically ascended characters. The protagonists Eben
and Abbie suffer from mental and physical degradation
concomitantly. They fail to materialize their wishes to snatch
Ephraim Cabot's farm because of the fact that they indulge in
coveting physical satisfactions. They fall prey to the monster of
incestuous lust that makes them suffer unceasingly. They do
notbridle their lustful attractions towards each other and make
themselves conquered by strong physical desire to consummate.
They stand as epitomes of intense passions. Thus, they exhibit
fierce desire to consummate their relationship. Their carnal
 ~xploration~ 2015 74

association in a disproportionate pairing makes them damned

forever. The initiation of unconventional suggestion by Abbie,
makes both of them heave to the pit of damnation. The
concoction of Abbie's lust and maternal love for Eben worsens
the situation. They become a disproportionate pair and invite
unusual calamity for each other.

I'll sing fur ye! I'll die fur yet (In spite of her
overwhelming desire for him, there is a sincere maternal
love in her manner and voice- a horribly frank mixture
of lust and mother love) Don't cry, Eben! I'll take yer
Maw's place! (0' Neil1 193)

Eben, submits to Abbie's advances and eventual1y,

consummates his relationship with her. But this synthesis
consequently brings the catastrophe upon them. In spite of the
fact that they feel something magical about this union, the
devastation is heading towards them: "Eben: 'T ain't likker. Jest
life," (O'Neill 195)This physical desire produces pernicious
effects on every single character of the play. The impending
disaster is even hinted at the very beginning of the play, which
accurately defines the suffering they experience later on.

Two enormous elms are on each side of the house. They

bend their trailing branches down over the roof. They
appear to protect and at the same tim.e subdue. There is a
sinister maternity n their aspect, a crushing, jealous
absorption. They have developed from their intimate
contact with life of man in the house an appal1ing
humaneness. They brood oppressively over the house.
They are like exhausted women resting their sagging
breasts and hands and hair on its roof, and when it rains
their tears trickle down monotonously and rot in the
shingles. (O'Neill 158)

These lines are implicitly indicating the detrimental

effects of incestuous relationship. They direct a reader or an
audience to extract the playwright's intention to uncover the
aftermaths of a relation that is considered disproportionate from
sociological perspective. Their lust makes them consummate
~xploriltiollg 2015 75

their relationship and bear an illegitimate child. These carnal

wishes lead them to the path of sin and crime where a mother
smothers her child. The act of infanticide to remove the sign of
their incestuous relationship proves to be ruinous for them. It
throws them in a calamitous plane where they pay the price for
crossing over the normative boundaries:

Abbie: (slowly and brokenly) I didn't want t' do it. I

hated myself fur doing' it. I loved him. He was so
purty dead spit 'n' image 0' yew. But I loved yew
more-an yew was goin' away-far off whar I'd never see
ye agen, never kiss ye, never feel ye pressed agin me
agen an' ye hated me fur havin' him-ye said ye hated
him and wished he was dead- ye said if it hadn't been
fur him comin' it'd be the same's afore between us.
(O'Neill 195)

This makes them understand that they should bear the

odds, pay the price of their act and must submit themselves to
suffering. They surrender themselves to the sheriff and put an
end to their relation based on physical needs. It makes them
understand that they should indemnify for their incestuous and
criminal acts.

Abbie: (Shaking her head) I got t' take my punishment;

pay fur my sin.
Eben: I'm guilty as yew be! He was child 0' our sin.
Abbie: No! I don't want yew t' suffer!
Eben: I got t' pay for my part 0' the sin! I'd suffer wuss
(cavin' ye, gain' West, thinkin' 0' dayan' night, bein'
out when yew was in- ( Lowering his voice) 'r bein'
alive when yew was dead. (A pause) I want t' share with
ye, Abbie- prison 'r death 'r hell 'r [Link]'! (he looks
into her eyes and forces a trembling smile) if I'm sharin'
with ye, I won't feel lonesome, leastways. (O'Neill
214)
~xplorationS'2015 76

This realization checks their physical relationship and

makes it something spiritual, happy and restitutes their lost
essence. They accept their suffering as warriors with a smile
and pledge to be on each other's side during the test of time.
Hence, it lifts them and their relationship to a higher level,
which will yield them peace for eternity: "They both stand for a
moment looking up raptly in attitudes strangely aloof and
devout."(O'Neill 216).
The rendering of suffering in Mourning Becomes
Electra represents similar metaphysical lift as did the previously
discussed plays. The suffering is ineluctable on the part of each
and every character because somehow all characters are
disproportionate pairs of each other; hence, they become
harbinger of distress in their own lives and the lives of others.
The adulteration by a mother, accusation by daughter, Captain
Adam's vengeance, Ezra Mannon's murder, and a son who
dwells in incestuous love, makes suffering to succumb to their
essence. They make choices out of their free will and endure
tragedy. The turmoil, sickness, nothingness and shallowness
become their fate. The trinity of guilt, grief and confession
become the residence of all. Each character, by going through
the maze of complete perplexity realizes its fate, position and
their purpose in life.

Christine: If I could only have stayed as I was then!

Why can't all of us remain innocent and loving and
trusting? But God won't leave us alone. He twists and
wrings and tortures our lives with other's lives until--we
poison each other to death! (O'Neill 759)

Christine realizes that she has sinned by commlttmg

adulteration and murder; therefore, she understands that she
needs to be purged from the plight in order to grasp her
innocent and loving self. On that account she gives her life the
way she took. Her son Orin, who is distant to his father, suffers
extreme jealousy when Lavinia reveals to him about Christine's
illicit relationship. He in a fit of fury murders Brant and marks
for himself a dwelling in the ditch of disintegration. He
unknowingly utters the following words when he kills Brant: "I
had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man
QExplorations 2015 77

over and over, and that in the end I would discover the man was
myself!" (O'Neill 789).From this onwards, he becomes
obsessed with his guilt because he witnesses the death of a
person whom he loved a lot i.e. his mother. Due to this reason,
he realizes that he should pay for his sins and for the death of
his mother and expresses this to Lavinia by accepting his place
in the darkness of suffering.

I hate the daylight. It's like an accusing eye! No we've

renounced the day, in which normal people live- or
rather it has renounced us. Perpetual night-darkness of
death in life- that's the fitting habitat for guilt! You
believe you can escape that, but I'm not so foolish.
(O'Neill 837)

Orin eventually feels that he should confess his crime in

order to relieve himself from the burden of guilt: "guilt crowds
up in my throat like poisonous vomit and I long to spit it out-
and confess!" (O'Neill 839).But the conscious actions of
characters and all the devastation which Mannons suffers
change Lavinia's lerspective of life; she becomes a person who
has a Dionysian experience on the Blessed Isles. She even
elucidates her change to Peter in the following words:

I loved those islands. They finished setting me free.

There was something mysterious and beautiful-a good
spirit-of love -coming out of the land and sea. It made
me forget death. There was no hereafter. There was only
this world- the warm earth in the moonlight- the trade
wind in the coco palms -the surf on the reef -the fires at
night and the drum throbbing in my heart -the natives
dancing naked and innocent -without knowledge of sin!
(O'Neill 834)

7Dionysus: God of Merry making, Intoxication, Fertility. Dionysian

festival: where Greeks used to celebrate the birth of Dionysus by drinking
and dancing. (Nietzsche 12).
Qfxplorations 2015 78

The camplete transformatian af a lifeless Lavinia ta a

lively ane makes her experience the true elements af her life till
the end. She dOlesnat apt for resignatian. She realizes that she
has ta live and bear the adds. The anly redeeming feature af life
is ta stare in the eyes af death and defeat it. Even when she
realizes that after Orin's suicide she is alane and Peter has
denaunced her, she dOlesnat apt for suicide rather she chaases
ta ga thraugh the pain in order ta put an end ta the suicides and
suffering af Mannans. Her staic perseverance exalts her stature
and she becomes a true heroic character af the play. Her last
wards explain her grip an this very fact that ane needs ta
canfrant the difficulties in order ta be purged from the drought
af disintegration and deterioratian.

Dan't be afraid. I'm nat gaing the way mather and Orin
went. That's escaping punishment. And there is no left
ta punish me. I'm the last Mannan. I've gat ta punish
myself! Living alane here with the dead is a worst abaut
af justice than death or prison! (O'Neil 84)

Cancluding, it can be inferred that the characters af

O'Neill are ordinary peaple but genuinely heroic in their spirit.
Their canstant effort ta achieve salace and camfart by
cauntering variaus miseries af life made them grasp the
knawledge beyand physical limitatians. They attain a higher
stature through their staic resignatian far suffering. They face
hardships in arder ta be cleansed fram the mundane, sinful, and
ardinary life. Their exuberance ta stare in the eyes af death and
turmail yields them a Dianysian experience. They became a
part af higher plane OIfexistence through lifting the veil af
Maja8 and grasping reality hidden beneath the apparent life.

8Veil of Maja is a concept given by Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German

Philosopher who used the phrase to describe a screen which exists between
"the world inside my head and the world outside my head," that is, the world
of human representation which has no true objectivity (Nietzsche 12).
llExplorattOlll, 2015 79

They tum out to be, in their own way, as grand as the heroic
Y lO
figures such as Oedipus, Hamlet, Achilies and Hector .

Works Cited

Bigsby, C.W.E. A critical introduction to twentieth century

American drama. I. Cambridge: Cambridge Cniversity,

1982. Print.

Black, Stephen. t.'ugene a 'Neill: Beyond Mourning and

Tragedy. NewHaven: Yale University, 1999. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. "The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of

Music." Trans. Array The Birth of Tragedy Out (~lthe

Spirit (~lMusic. . 2nd ed. Nanaimo, British

Columbia Canada: Vancouver Island University, 1872.

[Link]. 7 Jan. 2014.

O'Neill, Eugene. Nine Plays. New York: Modem Library,

Random, 192 I. Print.

O'Neill, Eugene. The Selected Plays ol Eugene O'Neill. New

York: Random, 1940. Print.

9In Greek mythology, he was a Greek hero of the Trojan War and the
central character and greatest warrior of Homer's Iliad. (Wikipedia, the Free
Encyclopedia) <[Link]
lOIn Greek mytholol!Y. Hector was a Irojan prince and the greatest fighter
for Troy in the I!"ojan Will:. As the first-horn son of King Priam and
Queen Hecub.!!. who was a descendant of Dardanus and Tros, the founder of
Troy. ( Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia)
<[Link] n .w ikiped ia. or g/wiki/Hector?,
<fxplorations 2015
80

O'Neill, Eugene. The Later Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New York:

Random, 1967. Print.

O'Neill, Eugene. The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New York:

Modem Library, 1982. Print.

Smith, I.A and W.D. Ross. eds. The Philosophy Collection.

London: Catholic Way Publishing. 1952. Print.

The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New York: Modem Library

Edition, Random House, 1982. Print.

Ql;xplorations 2015 81

The 'Melancholic' Subjects in Mohammad Hanif's Our

Lady of Alice Bhatti

Maimoona Khan

Abstract

The world of Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a world of

conflicting ideals, lost centers and ambivalent
relationships. Religious bent and sexual overtures
highlight the structure of the novel. The characters
oscillate between demands of the ego and the
libidinal. It is in such a clash, that they attach
themselves with what Freud identifies as the bane
of 'melancholia'. As melancholic figures the
characters, especially Alice and Teddy Butt, suffer
from a low self-esteem. In a bid to recuperate from
this loss of ego they resort to violence both in
matters personal and public. Both Alice and Teddy
are outcast within their own domains and in their
own uniquely unsure loss; they indulge in self-
deprecating activities. In a post-DerrideanJ world
then, Hanif's characters hanker after centers no
longer existent or are at least absent in a society
they inhabit. Having lost what was virtually non-
existent, the characters suffer from an irrevocable
melancholia. Freud's model serves as the ultimate
explanation of the existential distress they suffer
from. The conflict between the libido and the ego
results in the characters' aligning themselves to
various modes of sham religiosity and even more
pervert sexuality. Freud's melancholia highlights
this ambivalence; the attachment and subsequent
mourning for an unrealized object is what the
characters manifest.

I Derrida indicates that postponement is the fate of all things promising

reassurance; post-derridean implies not just postponement but the
annihilation of consolation. Nothing can possibly save them.
 <!Explorations 2015 82

Affecting the organically unified world, Our Lady of

Alice Bhatti struggles to keep its center alive. On the fringes of
losing its sense of proportion and absolute sanity, the
inhabitants of this world struggle to adhere to the master-
narratives in a bid to avoid absolute alienation. Ranging from
finding solace in religion to pseudo-nationalism, from love to
pervert sexuality, this urban populace of Our Lady vacillates
and hankers after abstractions which in a post-Derridean world
can no longer provide a sense of security. From the institution
of religion to that of marriage, everything present in this urban
setting has lost its fervor. Structured around this dwindling set-
up the characters act in a vacuum. The irreplaceable essence,
reduced to the status of an inanimate object, diminishes in size
and fervor with each attempt to locate it. The effort to hold on
to departing essences proves futile when the same ousts them as
apostates. Any possible assimilation with the object of desire is
further denied when the characters seek to destroy the same
(unknowingly) through their volition.

Throughout the novel, Eros is constantly countered by

Thanatos. The desire to preserve the integrity of long standing
traditions is defied by an effort to establish self-will. While
Alice, the central figure of the novel, strives for Eros to thrive,
her life is constantly faced with the "destructive instinct". From
her own criminal record to her eventual defacement punctuated
by instances of love, her life moves between the love and death
instinct. The absence of an l)ltimate center and abundance of
anguish makes her fluctuate between pseudo-church rituals and
a pretense of a marriage. Alice in her loss of reassurances is a
victim of Freudian melancholia. Characterized by an "object-
loss", Alice's state is that of complete hopelessness. Not only is
her marriage in trouble, but she is also on the verge of losing
her position as a devout catholic. Even as natural a thing as
heterosexual desire, loses its eroticization when it comes in
contact with the person in question. From her love affair with
the 'communist doctor', to her being the object of longing for
Noor and finally her marriage to Teddy Butt, Alice's intimacy is
hardly touched by romanticization of sex. This
deromanticization of sexual intercourse is another departure of
the norm. Another object lost; another abstract and ideal almost
\!Explorations 2015 83

non-existent. With the eventual disappearance of the sexual

instinct, what rises is the destructive impulse as "the destructive
or aggressive instinct emerges as a force coequal with
sexuality."(Breger 04) Alice's violent life in prison, her
aggressive reaction to pervert sexual overtures, her subsequent
marriage to the brutal Teddy Butt is the thriving of the thanatos.
In her the death or destructive instinct survives even when she
resists them. In her search for Eros, which is in her case the
ultimate lost object, she invites upon her the banes of
aggression. As a Freudian melancholic subject, she exhibits an
"impoverishment of the ego" by becoming the 'abject'. This can
be understood in terms of Julia Kristeva's concept of the
'abject':

What is abject ... the jettisoned object is radically

excluded ... a superego has flatly driven it away ... and yet
from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease
challenging its master ... to each ego its object, to each
superego its abject. (Kristeva 2)

The Sacred Heart, the Catholic Church all in chaos and

dwindling to non-existence acts as the regulating force. The
deeply critical religious watchdogs, in an attempt to direct
libidinal forces, locate the absconder and oust it as the abject.
Alice's relationship with the church marks tnis abjection. "You
could not grow in French Colony and not have God shoved
down your throat, His presence as pervasive as the stench from
the open sewers." (Hanif, 177) In the final loss of her real self,
she is neither the ego nor the libido. Having lost contact with
both the object and the subject, the final aggressive action of
which she is a victim transports her to the realm of the abject.
Her acid ridden existence takes her to the "improper and
unclean" of which she is by birth a part. In her being then, the
'abject' is not just the geographical space, the choohra colony,
but her own ugly existence too. The decisive death instinct saps
from her the libidinal forces till she is reduced to the inanimate,
inorganic state.

If Alice's is a state of lost objects/abstractions (religion,

love, marriage), Teddy Butt's state is of a "profoundly painful
~xplorationg 2015 84

dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the

capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the
self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-
reproaches and self-reviling, and culminates in a delusional
expectation of punishment." (Freud243). From his traumatic
childhood as a son of a PT teacher, to his nominal job in the G
Squad, to his dirty work of execution Teddy incarnates
destruction, aggression and death drive. Even as a love sick
patient feigning ailments, his object of violence is not out of
sight. His love confession to Alice is accompanied by his
carrying his Mauser. Inherent in his love episode, destroyed by
his sense of insecurity, is his inability to move to the organic
world. He seeks aggression and aggression is what he gets. By
defacing Alice he practices the repetition compulsion "in which
passively experienced traumas are actively repeated". (Breger,
108). His obsession with violence is an effort to regain the lost
object. The absence of a sound job with a secure income entails
Teddy's anguish of a lost abstraction. In his violence ridden life
love comes as a fleeting emotion which disappears at the very
first signs of aggression and in doing so takes away all chances
of life. His neurotic repetition of his childhood fears and the
eventual return of death sever his ties from the object a' petit
making him the Freudian melancholic subject.

Fraught with the post-modern distress, the world of Our

Lady suffers from severe lack of stability. Both Alice's and
Teddy's sense of proportion is threatened by constant dwindling
of the norm. They experience a falling out with the institutional
values. The so called establishments promising security provide
little solace to Alice and Teddy. For Alice, religion acts as an
inflated father figure. It acts as the prohibiting super ego
causing the libido to stifle. Her gradual denigration is traceable
through her gradual movement from the Catholic Church to the
Borstal Jail and then finally to the Charya ward. From being a
self proclaimed 'lover' of Jesus to being the bride of a 'musla',
Alice falls out of favour with the object. Teddy's predicament is
of a similar nature. His entire life is a hallmark of rejection.
This phenomenon of being can be understood in Hall's
depiction of an individual self in a decentred postmodern world.
He articulates that, "Postmodern culture with its decentered
(lExplorations 2015 85

subject can be the space where ties are severed or it can

provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding ...
(creating spheres which require) no meaningful connection to
the world of everyday. (Hall 111-12)

Unlike Alice he fails to get acceptance with any

institution from the onset. Fostered by a strict and violent
parentage, what he chooses for himself is a life of aggression
and violent misadventures. As a member of the so called police
squad, Teddy Butt finds little acceptance with this institution of
violence too. For both Alice and Teddy all totalizing notions
stand suspended and consequently what they seek is a
simulation of solace. Alice's transformation to a 'lady' and
savior figure comes about in face of absence of god. Teddy's
arrangement with the G squad is a result of absence of
economic stability. As true melancholic subjects, they are
completely divorced from objects that promise a place of
metanarrative. With all objects lost, the characters' only hope is
violence. It is through violence that they try to attain what is lost
for good. Violence is the means of getting away from the sense
of guilt and resultant anxiety. As melancholia takes over both,
Alice and Teddy resort to violence as a means to recuperate the
lost ego. In a world of dwindling ideals the only long standing
tradition is of violence and acts of aggression. Alice gains little
as a nurse then she does as a jail inmate and later as a runaway
convict. Teddy lives and thrives by the death code. He has lived
with violence throughout his life and now wins his bread
through it. His exhibitional aggression offers him security more
than marriage, love or religion. Aggression for him masks and
inverts reality-reality which is not only bitter but is devoid of
all reassurances. His final act of aggression seals death's
triumph over love. In a melancholic situation then, thanatos
survives and Eros stifles. Little time, in the discourse of the
novel, is devoted to the matrimonial bliss of the couple. Their
conjugal bliss is never away from lewd gestures, pervert
sexuality and most of all violence. In the final act of violence all
institutions of marriage, law and religion are disrupted and
destabilized. The characters manifest little faith in these centers
and consequently face a deprivation and loss of object. The
postmodern reality of Our Lady supplements the characters'
(/fxplorationll' 2015 86

melancholy. With its weakened centers, it augments and

worsens the state of 'object loss'. The world of Alice Bhatti
then is a perfect Freudian melancholic model. With every
metanarrative impoverished and grand -narrative exhausted, the
characters thrive through their own version of illusive reality.
What these melancholic ridden characters fail to realize is that
the loved lost object hardly exists, what thrives is a world of
contingent ideas and notions. Alice's rise to the status of a
savior marks the complete irreversibility of the religious
process. In her is not only the subversion of the religious
institute but the very demeaning of it too. In such a condition
then the characters fail to associate with any new object of love.
The death instinct as the final triumphant completely destroys
the ego thus completing the melancholic process. Hate, murder
and aggression drain love, procreation and god.

Works Cited

Butler, Christopher. Post-Modernism: A Very Short

Introduction. NY: GUP, 2002. Print.

Breger, Louis. Freud's Unfinished Journey: Conventional and

Critical Perspectives in Psychoanalytic Theory.

London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the PleasurePrinciple. London: The

Hogarth Press, 1920. Print.

--- Civilization and its Discontents. NY: Norton& Company,

1961. Print.

Hanif, Muhammad. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. New York:

Random House, 2011. Print.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New

(fxp(orationli 2015 87

York: CUP, 1982. Print.

Thurschwell, Pamela. Routledge Critical Thinkers: Sigmund

Freud. London: Taylor and Francis Group, 2001. Print.

 QExplorations 2015 88

Essays

How I Wrote My Books?

Dr. Tariq Rahman

I studied in Bum Hall school in Abbottabad which was

administered by the Roman Catholic clergy and had a very good
time there. In 1970 I entered PMA as a cadet and got
commission in the armoured corps. In 1978, basically because 1
was a conscientious objector to the military action in
Bangladesh, I left the army and went to England on a British
Council scholarship. I had never, except for a few weeks,
studied in any Pakistani university though I had a B.A and three
M.A degrees as a private candidate from both Peshawar and
Punjab universities. However, my first experience of university
was the University of Sheffield. I got both M.A and Ph.D from
this university in English literature and not in linguistict. It was
in 1989 that I got an [Link] in linguistics from Stathclyde and
finally in 2014 the University of Sheffield conferred a higher
doctorate ([Link]) upon me after examining my published work.
Earlier, in 2012, I was the first Pakistani to have been given the
Humboldt research award for it and our own HEC had also
given me the lifetime achievement award on it in 2009.
Moreover, two presidential awards, the Pride of Performance
(2004) and the Sitara-e-Imtiaz (2013) had been given in
recognition of it by state. What was this work? This is what this
memoir is about.

This work is in the form of articles in journals, chapters

in books, encyclopedia articles but I will confine myself to
book. The books I am talking about here are not my short
stories (three collections) or poems in English (two slim
collections) but only scholarly books with one major theme and
not collections of articles or edited books. There are seven of
them: Pakistani English (1990; A History of Pakistani
Literature in English (1991); Language and Politics in Pakistan
(1996); Language, Ideology and Power: Language-learning
QExplorations 2015 89

among the Muslims of Pakistan and India (2002); Denizens of

Alien Worlds (2004); From Hindi to Urdu: a Political and
Social History (2011) and Names: A Study of personal Names,
Identity and Power in Pakistan (2015). All except the first two
were published by the Oxford University Press (Pakistan) and
some were also published by Orient Blackswan in India.

When I eventually left the army in April 1978 I could

have pursued various careers: the civil service as army officers
could opt for it at that time; the United Nations and the
corporate sector. I did not want to enter government service
since I thought the best service, if wanted to serve the
government as an officer, was the army. I got to know about the
UNO later but then I had made up my mind to become an
academic. And, as for the corporate sector, I never thought
about it at all. I had a vague idea it gave no time to study and for
me one's job should give one time to read books. The only
profession which did give time to read books was the university
I was told so that is what I wanted to join. I came back to
Pakistan on 15 April 1985 with a Ph.D in English literature and
on the 16th I started two things: looking for a university
appointment and collecting material to write a book to be
entitled A History of Pakistani Literature in English.

I heard that Professor Daud Kamal was a poet of English

and he lived in Peshawar where he headed the department of
English literature so I went to interview him for my book. At
the end of the interview Daud Sahib offered me an associate
professorship since, as he told me, [Link] in English literature
were a rare species. I had a lecturership in the Open University
in Islamabad and lived in my father's house and drove his car so
I was not very keen to come to Peshawar. I thought my wife,
Rehana (Hana) would hate living in a city where women cannot
move around easily and my mother would not like us living in
danger (the Afghan war was still going on). However, to my
surprise, both ladies jumped at the proposal and nobody listened
to my objections. I even threatened my mother with the sale of
my plot in Karachi Defence to buy a car and furniture thinking
she would refuse such an absurd proposal. But 10 and behold
 Ql;xp!orations 2015 90

she agreed and we had to go to Peshawar where I wrote the

book spending my own money on it.

The pursuit of language began in earnest in 1987 when I

was given a full professorship and the headship of the English
department at the University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir in
Muzaffarabad. I was only 38 years of age and still had the naIve
belief that dreams could come true if one tried. I requested the
VC to make someone else its head because the administrative
work took too much time which I could hardly spare from my
research. I was rotated and an associate professor was given the
chairmanship. I was now free to pursue my research. At last the
book was completed and Najam Sethi, proprietor of Vanguard
Press in Lahore, had already showed interest in it so I sent it to
him in 1988. It was published in 1991.

Now I come to the story of how I wrote my major book

Language and Politics in Pakistan (1996) and a small
byproduct of my study of linguistics in Scotland called
Pakistani English (1990). Both stories go together.

My idea of a perfect day is to lie in an armchair in the

open sunshine reading a book. And this is exactly what I was
doing that balmy April day in 1988 in Muzaffarabad. The book
I was reading was Jyotirindra Das Gupta's Language, Conflict
And National Development (1970)

"It seems nobody has written on language and politics in

Pakistan," I told my wife. Actually I was only thinking aloud
but one does not want to be taken as a lunatic every time one
opens one's mouth.

"So, are you going to write another book," she said

triumphantly like the thanedar (jailer) who has finally caught
the thief who stole the spoons.

"Well, I just might. This chap Das Gupta did," I said

tentatively.

"He had research grants in Berkeley whereas here

nobody will give you a fig for writing a book" she
QExplorations 2015 91

argued and I agreed and laid down arms. But the

desire did not die. It merely slept.

In September 1988 I was told that I had got an Overseas

Development Association (ODA) scholarship. I had applied for
it but did not believe I would actually get it. But, quite
incredibly, it had come through. As I had a Ph D from England I
thought I would go to Scotland this time.

"I want to collect research material," I told

Geoffrey Keye.

"But you will have to do it in your spare time," he

said. 'This is a one-year course in linguistics. It is
very tough".

Once again, in October 1988, I landed at Heathrow

Airport. But this time I was no greenhorn as I had been when I
first arrived at the same airport in 1980 and had to sleep on a
bench all night since I had missed the British Council officer.
Now I blithely went to the coach and from there to the Victoria
terminal. The British Council office welcomed me and lodged
me in a poky little hotel near Piccadilly. In that forlorn room I
wondered whether I should have come alone at all.

When I knew I was wrong about being able to stay alone

I called my wife and our two children, Tania, aged five and
Fahad aged three, to Scotland.

When I was writing my thesis on these rules my right

hand broke and both my children developed chicken pox. So
there we were, imprisoned in our flat, outside which children
ran and shouted all day in the lovely Scottish summer. Inside,
we whiled away the long summer day writing my thesis. I say
we because I dictated and my wife wrote it. Even the more
technical aspects, such as linguistic formulas, were written by
her, though I used my left hand to indicate the rough shape. It
was this thesis which was later published as Pakistani English
and which is used by many research students for their linguistic
studies in Pakistan.
llExplorationli 2015 92

But Pakistani English was small fry compared to

Language and Politics in Pakistan which was the main reason
why I went for an [Link] degree after a Ph.D. In September
1990, I was appointed in the Institute of Pakistan Studies as an
associated Professor of Linguistics. I had to go to England for
research and a summer course in the University of Cambridge
was offered. But after that course I had to survive on my own
and work in the India Office Library.

My own university and the University Grants

Commission declined to oblige me because my research project
was, in their bureaucratic jargon, completely 'private'. So,
steeling my heart, I invaded the family bank balance. It was not
much of a balance, I discovered, and my depredations made it
very unbalanced indeed. In Cambridge I stayed at Downing
College. It was summer and the sights and sounds of the
summer terms which EM Forster loved so much, invaded my
senses. By the time the course ended I found that I had filled my
bag with so much photocopied material that I could hardly lift
it. Thus loaded, I left Cambridge for Reading where myoid
Sheffield friend Dr Balasabramanyam Chandramohan lived.
Mohan was as friendly and considerate as ever and lived in
Reading. I travelled miles away to the India Office Library
which used to be in the east End at that time. At last the summer
ended and I returned loaded with more books from England.

In December 1991 I was given ajob in the University of

Sana' a, Yemen. This job, while good for making dollars, was
useless for research. Thus when I was offered a job in Saudi
Arabia in the University of Jeddah on an even better salary I
told my wife that research was not possible either in Yemen or
in Saudi Arabia and, since that is what I lived for, we should
return to Pakistan. We came back in July 1992.

The Linguistic Map of Pakistan was far from clear to me

by the end of 1992 but the only area I thought I knew somewhat
better was Sindh and Multan. Here two language movements,
both connected with politics, were going on. The first was the
Sindhi language movement and the second was the Siraiki one.
I had been offered a place of stay in the Bahauddin Zakariya
QExplorationli 2015 93

University in Multan so I went there first. But when I descended

from the train in Multan I did not know where BZU was. I had,
however, lived in the cantonment as a young officer in 1971.

"Take me to the cantonment," I told the yellow

cab driver.

"Which place?"

"Where there are tanks," I told him.

Later, warm in bed sheets, I thanked God for having

passed that terrible nine mile run in PMA otherwise I would
never have been commissioned and would be shuttling
somewhere in the darkness of Multan.

The next day I "thanked my host and set off on my

odyssey. With my luggage in hand, I tried to look around for
Shaukat Mughal Sahib, a lecturer at a college in Multan. I did
not even know which college he was in and simply wandered
from one to the other till he was discovered at Bosan road. He
was most helpful and gave me the address of Dr Mehr Abdul
Haq-the father of Siraiki!

"And please have lunch with me," he said by way

of good-bye.

I was overwhelmed with gratitude. In Islamabad we

have become so Westernised and busy that we have to think
twice before offering hospitality. But here the old world with its
generous hospitality still existed. I took his address and went off
in quest of Mehr Abdul Haq.

Multan had expanded in twenty years but the scooter

rickshaws were still around. And on one of them I reached the
house of Dr Mehr Abdul Haq. They took me to his room where
he lay in bed-a frail old man but still mentally alert.

"I was the first to write on the history of the

Multan language," he told me.
~xploration5 2015 94

Then began a long interview which gave me much

information. I also took the addresses of the other people I
would have to see in Multan. And full of ideas, still with my
bag, I went for lunch to Shaukat Mughal's houses.

I had no time for anyone in BZU as I ran around

interviewing people and being a persistent nag. I talked to the
office bearers of Taj Mohammad Langah's party, the Pakistan
Siraiki Party, into fixing an interview with him; so on interview,
which can only be descried as a marathon session. It lasted well
over four hours and my questions came in edgeways to be
drowned under a chronological narrative in which there were
many asides and alleys.

At last in the end of January I caught the fast train to

Karachi. The aim was to visit Hyderabad. If only half of the
tales of the dacoits were true, this was like going into the
battlefield unarmed. This is where, admitting defeat, I turned to
the army ... but thereby hangs a tale.

In 1978 I was commanding a squadron of tanks in Thall,

a remote outpost near Parachinar. I was on my way out so as
soon as a good officer rejoined the regiment they posted him as
the squadron commander to Thall. This new officer was Major
Malik Mohammad Saleem Khan who was now a major-general
in Karachi. In Thall we had shared a room where I had told him
why I was leaving the army.

So now, on the strength of the bond of that

companionship in far-away Thall, I dialed his number. I told
General Saleem that I wanted security. If he had vehicles
running to Hyderabad, perhaps I could hitch a ride. And, above
all, I wanted a place to stay in Hyderabad which I would pay
for.

"Don't worry," he said in his quiet voice, "you will

be my guest. This is no problem. But since when
have you developed this insecurity? I remember
you used to be an accomplished rider and went in
for para jumps".
Qfxplorationl> 2015 95

I did not tell him that courage is not only part of one's
psychological makeup; it is also a product of one's support
system and there is no stronger system than the army which had
made me braver than I am.

On the set date I went to the general's office and his

ADC put me in a car which took me to Hyderabad where I was
lodged in the Desert Inn-a guest house of the army. The next
day I went to the Institute of Sindhology at the University of
Sindh, Jamshoro".

"I have come for research on the Sindhi language

movement," I told the librarian.

"We have files and files on it. What exactly ... ?"

Like a greedy child who pounces upon a heap of sweets

I pounced upon the files. The Sindhi sources where difficult to
read but I managed to make the general sense of the passages.
In the evening, while dining in the mess, I heard an explosion
which shook the huge building.

"What was that?" asked an officer who was dining

with me.

"An explosion in Latifabad, the Mohajir area," replied

another. We returned to our meal but I was full of apprehension.
All night the whine of alarms and the clanking of horns kept me
awake. I tossed around restlessly in a fit of insomnia.

"I have to go to the Hyderabad Municipality," I told

Panhwar, the young lecturer who was helping me.

"Do not, please. That is where the bomb went off,"

he said in panic.

"But I must see the records to find out whether,

and if so, when Urdu was made the official
language of record of the Municipal Corporation."

"It was. We know it," he sa;d.

"One needs proof for research," I said.

 l!Exploratiom, 2015 96

In the next few days I got an in-depth knowledge of the

Urdu-Sindhi riots of January 1970 and July 1972.

General Saleem also asked the Commissioner of Karachi

to help me locate material in the Clifton archives. I thanked
General Saleem for his help for which I was genuinely grateful
but I also told him why research was such a rare commodity in
this country. The gist of what I told him was this:

"In countries where research is easy, scholars have

prestige and access to documents is a right. In this
country it needs a general and a commissioner, the
army and the bureaucracy, to provide access to
archival records. It is enough to make anyone give
up in despair".

To my surprise he fully agreed and did not even call me

a firebrand as he used to in 1978 in our shared room in Thall.
As I write this today (August 2015) I remember General Saleem
who died of cancer early this year. He was a gentleman in the
real sense of the term as the British used it. He was gentle and
humane and that is the greatest compliment I can pay him.

Next, I had to visit Lahore to find out about the Punjabi

Language Movement. I began with the idea that this would be
an easy language movement to investigate. After all I did not
speak Sindhi and did not even understand the text without the
help of translators. But Punjabi I could understand and speak,
and this, I thought, would be a great advantage. Those who look
after the archives see to it that no scholar can somehow sneak
in. In Karachi they hid them in Clifton but in Lahore they went
one up-they put them within the Secretariat. Now if you have
not dealt with the bureaucracy, especially the bureaucracy of
Lahore, you would imagine that public servants are paid by the
public to serve the citizens. Well, you will learn the lesson of
your life if you start telling that to the chaps who look after the
Punjab archives. First, the thanedars' boys at the gate, the
police-walas, will not let you in. And if they the bureaucracy
knows how to deny you the pleasure of actually looking at
them. Thus, there was not much that I could benefit from in the
QExplorationl> 2015 97

Anarkali archives though I am told foreign scholars are given

better treatment.

What happened to the Punjabi movement after the

partition? For an answer I went to the Punjabi Adabi Board. The
only thing I knew about it was that it was near the veterinary
hospital i.e kora aspatal (horse hospital). So this is what I told
the rickshaw driver. The man was a proper Lahori. He thought
up all kinds of abusive terms about poor horses when he lost his
way. When reminded that our target was the Punjabi Adabi
Board he was none too polite. He let Punjabi have it too. But
just when Punjabi's mother and sister had been proved to be no
better than they should, we found the place. It was a small
house in a quiet lane-a very unlikely place for a language
planning board. But the man I met there was remarkable. His
name was Asif Khan and he was one of those motivated
intellectuals who keep writing despite all odds. I did not know
how much he had written then but his humility and helpfulness
impressed me. We talked in Punjabi though he must have
guessed that it was not my mother tongue. But it is a language I
enjoy speaking and so the interview went well.

In 1993 the book had advanced beyond the stage of

ideas and drafts. The chapters on the Siraiki, Punjabi and Urdu-
English controversies in Pakistan were ready in rough form. But
the Bengali language Movement was a non-starter as I had only
secondary sources and that too in English on it. I did not know
what to do so in sheer desperation I rang up the military attache
in the embassy of Bangladesh. As we talked it turned out that
although the brigadier did not know me he was in PMA at the
same time though senior to me. He said he would arrange
everything and tell his friend Brigadier Shareef to receive me at
the Dhaka airport. And what a blessing it was that the friendly
Brigadier was there since there was a strike and I would not
have know how to leave the airport. Brigadier Shareef took me
to his own flat and I rested in his son's room and we went to the
university where somebody had promised me a room. Again
there was a strike and, being a Pakistani, [Link] said I
should not risk chasing a room. So I passed the night in his
house and next day we started hunting for a room again. Now I
 <!Explorationg 2015 98

had been given only a ticket by the Hakeem Saeed Hamdard

Foundation but no money to live in Dhaka. I had brought
money out of our savings but that was not enough to find
suitable accommodation in Dhaka. So, as we roamed around
Dhaka I felt terribly exhausted and depressed. Research just did
not look possible.

Back in Brig. Shareef's office I visited the toilet and

found a large dressing room which was airconditioned. When I
came back I announced to him:

'I will stay in your dressing room'

He was appalled and said that would hardly be

hospitable but I was adamant and that is where I lived in an
office which took on the appearance of a haunted house at
night. And I hired students who translated documents for me
and I sought people I could interview and read whatever I could
on the Bhasha Ondolan of 1952. Then, just when there was a
scare of plague in Calcutta jumping to Dhaka, 1 flew back to
Islamabad with research material bursting the seams of my
bags.

There were other trips too-London, Oxford, Chitral,

Peshawar, Abbottabad etc-but one cannot describe them for
lack of space. At last in 1995 January the book went to the
Oxford University Press and was published in December 1996.
It was an instant success. It was reprinted five times and then
published by Orient Longmans in India and is still much sought
after.

My next book, a tome of nearly 700 pages called

Language, Ideology and Power, on the history of language-
learning on the Muslims of South Asia was born dead. I worked
so hard at it and, like before, travelled to England living with
Chandramohan and in Oxford's colleges. I had to survive on an
apple for lunch as the savings I used had to be stretched as
much as possible. I even went to India and lived in the lIT at
Delhi and in Jawaharlal University trying to collect material on
Urdu in India. I found and put in so many original sources in it
that the book is tough to read. Perhaps that is why very few
<!Explorations 2015 99

people actually read it. The Oxford edition came out in 2002
and the Indian edition in 2008 but both fell on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, out of the work I had done for the previous two
books, I salvaged some chapters and undertook a new survey
which became a study of the education system of Pakistan. This
was published as Denizens of Alien Worlds. It was better
received than the previous book and enjoyed two reprints
though it was not anywhere near Language, Ideology and
Power in scholarly quality.

Between 2002 and 2004 I spent time in scholarly

wilderness which means I was not writing a book though I was
writing chapters and articles and, of course, a weekly column in
a newspaper. In that year I was appointed to the Pakistan Chair
at the University of California, Berkeley and there I started
thinking of writing an alternative history of Pakistan which is
still unwritten and a social and political history of Urdu which
has seen the light of the day in 2011. When this book started our
Higher Education Commission had been formed and Professor
Atta ur Rahman was its head. He was a courteous gentleman of
whom I was very fond and he asked me to apply for a research
grant to write this book. But the middl~level bureaucracy of the
HEC took two years in giving me a grant and that was so
meager that I had to spend my own money on my research. But
this time I got a fellowship in the Oxford Centre of Islamic
Studies and later at the South Asia Centre at the University of
Heidelberg (DAAD fellowship). So I went to India with HEC
money and to Britain and Germany on fellowhips. I also learned
Persian and polished my Devanagari script and the book came
along well. In 2011 it was published first in India and then in
Pakistan. It is doing reasonably well and is being reprinted as a
paperback.

In 2011 I retired as professor emeritus from NIPS

(QAU) and was offered a deanship in the Beaconhouse National
University in Lahore. And here in 2012 I thought, quite by
chance, of writing an article on Pakistani names and their
relationship with identity. This article grew into a book and that
was launched in April 2015. The story of getting the names for
the book is as hilarious as the other stories I have told the reader
l!Exp\orations 2015 100

but I do not have space for it. Briefly, I tried to get the names
from NADRA and, despite the fact that Tariq Malik, the head of
the institution, was known to me, I never got the names. The
young man who was volunteering to help me for a small fees
banged his head against the bureaucracy of the place and was
sent back every time. Even the boards of education did not give
me names when I asked for them. Friends got them somehow.
Even my secretary got the names-and she told me she used my
name and official position for it-but I did not. Private schools
refused outright and so did the elite clubs and madrassas. My
colleague, Ms Amina Gardezi, however, got the names of an
elite club and a former army officer got the voting lists from
Baluchistan. As I had the chance to stay in Heidelberg both in
2012 and in 2013 I had easy access to secondary sources and so
the book was completed and published in 2015. That it was
published along with my very first major research book A
History of Pakistani Literature in English first published by
Vanguard of Najam Sethi and now reprinted by the Oxford
University Press was a source of great satisfaction for me.

So what does one learn from this personal saga of

research. That it is very difficult to carry out research since it is
not encouraged in Pakistan. I know there is much talk of
encouraging PhD and [Link] but that is not the only kind of
research one carries out. There are people like me who work on
their own because they are internally motivated; because for
them research is a hobby. They should be given funds and time
on the strength of their previous work but they are not. The
hassle of applying for grants puts them off and they are forced
to use their savings or apply for research positions in foreign
universities. I have found this to be very uncertain. That is why
every little bit I publish is like an odyssey. How long I can
continue to publish I do not know. But one of the things I keep
emphasizing is that scholars should be valued for what they are.
They have a right to the society's wealth and leisure (time for
research) so that they can keep producing their work-work
which may not have any direct relevance to the production of
wealth or development or national interest as narrowly defined.
They should be encouraged because they produce a research
culture which ultimately produces what everyone values: a
QExpiorations 2015 101

better life on planet earth! That is why I look upon research

funds and leisure as my right whether I receive them or not.
<!ExplorationS' 2015 102

My, Me, I; Ours, We, Us; Theirs, They, Them

Dr. Waqas Khwaja

It is a truth perhaps not unacknowledged that though we

can, and may, leave home, we never return to it. Yes, yes, we
come back sometimes, even often, in some cases. But where is
that home? What has become of it? Why doesn't it feel the
same anymore? Why don't We recognize it as we remember it?
What happened to it? What happened to the dear ones we left
behind? To our parents, our siblings, our relations, the
inhabitants of our household, our pets? That room that was ours,
though its furniture looks more or less the same, is not quite that
intimate, private space it once was to us. The rooms and
corridors, that clock above the mantelpiece, the shining dining
table, the beds, the sofas and rugs, same, but not the same. The
kitchen, the pots, and the crockery, somewhat faded and
fatigued. The garden, still blooming with flowers as we left it,
but why does it look a little stale, a little ordinary? The
backyard and its fruit trees, still there, but helpless and bereft
somehow.

And then it may hit us suddenly. It is we who have

changed. Our orbit of experiences, our views, our perceptions.
Where is that youth who skipped about without a care in the
world, floated in and out of the house on whim, dashed through
corridors and rooms, swerving past furniture and stands with
dainty breakable displays, heady with laughter lmd delight? It is
our childhood that is gone. And, with it, that childhood vision is
no more. It is the innocence of youth too, that [Link],
unsuspecting faith in the world, in the present as we had known
it and the future that we imagined for ourselves with never a
thought to the loved ones, as if they would never dwindle, never
decline, that is lost. It is the young adult just coming into its
own, seeing everything with that delicious wonder of a new and
fabulous discovery, alight with expectation, who is gone. And
everyone else has grown up or aged a bit, the time of separation
opening a window to their physical attributes and personality
traits that wasn't there before. In some strange way we have
<!Explorations 2015 103

become strangers to those we left behind. In some equally

strange way, those we left behind have become strangers to us.

But what do we do with memories? There everything is

preserved just the same as it ever was. Now, perhaps, we
realize, for the first time, that the world doesn't ever stand still.
People grow up. People grow old. People are fragile. They pass.
Place and location do not remain the same. Distance has made
everything dearer to us, but when we come back it is no longer
as we remember it. Indeed, it is not just our perception of it. The
world too has changed. But who are these, calling for attention
from the dark borders of our memory?

What is it we have forgotten? Are there people missing

from this picture of our past? People who have dutifully fallen
back from what memory has preserved. People who would like
you to remember them, but don't expect it. People who would
want you to notice them, but are hesitant to project themselves
to your attention when you are so engaged and excited in
meeting all those long lost relatives and friends? Look! They
are still there. No, not poor relations. They too, perhaps, get
delayed, and somewhat casual, attention. Oh, it is our cooks and
housemaids, our dusting boys and gardeners, our drivers and
chowkidars, our sweepers and sweepresses, diligent, silent until
addressed directly, and often invisible. Now, perhaps, we see
them called to present themselves and say their salaams before
being dismissed out of sight, except those that are expected to
serve or provide food and other necessary services. Quite a cast
of characters living in the shadows!

We notice, now, with some discomfort how brusquely,

how imperiously, they are treated. If we were not already
uneasy about this before we left home, this discernment too,
probably, is the fruit of our "foreign" experience. They are
expected to wait and languish silently in the background, alert,
however, to any sign or word of need, while we enjoy your
lavish repast, our deserts, our exotic refreshments, over an
exchange of anecdotes and jokes, and the regulation after-dinner
session of political wrangling. We are abashed to see how they
are treated as if they did not exist, that is, not until they are
 qExploratioml2015 104

needed, and how their slightest hesitation or confusion is an

occasion for ridicule and sneers, if not downright abuse. But our
courage fails when we wish to protest against this treatment of
the domestics. We have just arrived. Everyone is so happy to
see us. We don't want to spoil the atmosphere for everyone.
And we remember, with a pang, an unpleasantness or two that
might have occurred on such "fancy" issues of rights and
respect a few years earlier, when we had not yet made our way
out into the wide-open world across the oceans.

How shallow and artificial is our world, we think. How

hypocritical! How safely cocooned in the security of family
status, wealth, and entitlement! Even when we break away, we
know we are still part of the system that favors those with
family resources at the expense of millions who live but a life in
name, ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-sheltered, debarred not only
themselves from advancing their lot in life, but in imagining a
life of dignity, of education, a respectable opportunity to earn a
living, of adequate healthcare, comfort, even for their kids.
They are all around us, but our kind, it strikes us, do not see
them, do not notice them at all as we go about our daily
indulgences and the routine of complaints about all that we
desire but cannot have. How much do we know about them?
How they live, or even where they live? What they eat when
they are in their own small room or hovel with their families?
How their time is spent when they are not working in our
homes? Do they have a second source of income? Do they
double as peddlers selling ice-cream from pushcarts, or balloons
on a stick, or potato chips from a bag slung on a shoulder? Do
they work as cobblers in the evening, or ply a rickshaw for
someone, or hire themselves out for petty services? Isn't that
woman roasting gram and com on that small roadside oven of
dried clay the Mehtrani who sweeps our floors in the mornings?
We don't know. And we don't care. It is not for us to worry
what these people do, or how they survive, or what their needs
are? We know that our cook isn't one of them, for he, or she, is
on duty with us twenty-four hours a day and gets to lodge in our
servant quarters in recompense. We know that the housemaid is
well provided for with a room of her own in the servant
QfxpioratioltS 2015 105

quarters, for she too is needed 24/7. But we are not responsible
for the whole world.

Now if we emerge out of our bourgeois angst (or is it

anomie?) for a few minutes, can we visualize how someone
from the province of the people in the shadows feels about
leaving home, and coming back to it? Do they have the same
narcissistic thoughts and feelings that we have about loss of
innocence and the loss of home, the passage of time and the
ravages it leaves in its wake? They are the ones, for example,
recall, whom we are so contemptuous of when we travel on that
last stretch of our journey to Pakistan, passengers the plane
picks up from transit stations like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain,
and the like. They with those huge, out-of-date, portable three-
in-one audio systems, rolled beddings corded with hemp twine
or plain cotton rope, battered suitcases, and a miscellany of toys
and knickknacks in hands or in plastic bags, teetering in the
aisle as they go about trying to find a suitable storage bin for
their assorted luggage. And we tum up our noses at the way
they talk, the way they carry themselves, the outlandishly garish
clothing they wear, at how those of them who have women in
tow have them all covered up in burqas or chadors, but all
extravagantly painted and made up underneath. They too have
family and friends waiting for them at home. They have kids
too, who are growing up in their absence, without the
immediacy of their love and protection. And spouses left
behind, expected just to take the jibes of in-laws, neighbors,
friends and strangers alike as they patiently wait for their return.
These hardy souls voyaging out to seek a living, to improve
their economic condition, may come back to harrowing changes
as well-the sickness or death of a child, parents in anguish
over insufficient resources suffering extreme deterioration of
health or mental breakdown, families turned out of a two-room
flat simply because they could be thrown out, simply because
they had no one .to look out for them, a spouse gone astray,
unable to cope, or lost to the unrelenting mists of black
depression. Loaded with their cheap toys and battered suitcases
stuffed with bargain clothing and other inexpensive gift items,
how do they feel when they arrive home? Do they tell their
family how they slaved 20 hours a day to bring this little bounty
<!Explorations 2015 106

of cheap stuff for them? Or how they were despised and

mistreated by the people they work for, by the people of the
country they work in? Do they describe to them their shabby
living quarters, where they share a 12 x 14 room with fifteen
people, all sleeping on the floor, all using the only closet
bathroom available to them? Will it help if they said how they
had been abused and betrayed year after year, generation after
generation, age after age, for as long as they or their ancestors
can remember? Who is interested in their plight? Are we? It is
as if there we~e two separate nations within a "nation", the
haves and the have-nots, the prosperous and the destitute.
Between them' there is no understanding. Not just their
vocabularies, their languages are different.

So no one writes the histories of the dispossessed and

the marginalized. It is inscribed only on the skin of their bodies
and in the invisible intricacies of their brain cells, and such
inscriptions are easily obliterated. We may set people on fire
and bum them to death. We 'may shoot them with a gun. Blow
them up with a homemade bomb. We may chop off their head.
Or we may shut them up in a prison cell and just forget about
them. There are many ways of getting rid of people we may
consider undesirable. And there are many'pretexts to find
people as offensive and expendable. An expression may be too
bold. A gesture may upset us. Someone's reUgion may not be
quite acceptable. Even the wrong denomination may ignite our
ire. But poverty and helplessness, this is particularly odious, and
it generates in us an incredible sense of empowerment, for in
such a condition we can disfigure and destroy with impunity,
without fear of consequences. Our spirit rages with some
primordial urge to crush and pulverize the poor and the
powerless. It is there blood, sweat, and tears that ensure our
prosperity. This is the social value we have inherited from our
ancestors. This is the economic system we swear by. This is our
political philosophy irrespective of our form of government,
civilian or military.

And we who have turned our face from this

commonplace crowd of people find in them the source of all
evil. They are the unregenerate, the misguided, the most
QExplorations 2015 107

retrograde. It little bothers us that they comprise over 90% of

the country's population, and if they could organize and plan an
uprising, they could sweep our paltry sense of security away in
an instant. Weare fortunate, though, in that, this huge mass of
people is divided naturally by language and cultural
differentials. We have our controls firmly in place. Power
resides, first and foremost, with the English-speaking elite that
believes it has inherited the mantle of the departing British
colonial administration. The next level of defense is the
imposition of Urdu as the national language of the country and
all that this necessitates in terms of investment of resources in
maintaining that status and promoting it as the medium of
education for the populace generally. Only after space,
resources, and precedence is ceded to these two privileged
languages do the "provincial" or "regional" languages come
into play. Although the perils of such an approach were clearly
demonstrated in the breaking away of the country's eastern
wing to form the independent State of Bangladesh, we have not
learned much from it, for we continue to pursue it even as the
hazards of this policy grow daily in depth, scope, and
complexity.
We now discover that we are not just two nations but
many within the country or State that we call one, that the lines
of division are not just of class, the inequitable distribution of
wealth, opportunities, and resources, but of linguistic and
cultural differentiations as well. Thus, whereas, the rich do not
speak or understand the language of the poor, provincial
boundaries further multiply the demographic and linguistic
diversity. This should have prompted a policy of flexibility and
inclusiveness. However, the reverse has come to pass. Like the
British in India, the center (the Federal government) has
imposed its linguistic writ on the country has a whole. The
provinces have thus been deprived of their linguistic recognition
and identity. The poor, needless to say, have been totally
ignored.
Would it really harm our commitment to a single State if
all the country's spoken languages were officially given parity,
an equal chance to develop and grow? Many studies have
 QExplorations 2015 108

argued that it would advance the literacy rate and quality of life
in all the. provinces of the country. What is the harm in
recognizing all these languages, Sindhi, Pashto, Baluchi,
Punjabi, Urdu, and English, as "national languages?" Isn't our
multilingual, multicultural heritage something to be proud of,
something to hold on to and embrace? It was the imperial
British regime that silenced and disempowered the populations
of the subcontinent by imposing 0).1 them the regime of a foreign
tongue and rendering their languages peripheral and irrelevant.
It was a deliberate attempt to kill the spirit and pride of the
people by killing their language. That is how the development
of several of these languages was arrested. Now that the British
have left, should not such policies of theirs that were
detrimental to local cultures and languages be also dismissed?
Or was the so-called independence only gained to replace the
authority of the gora sahib with the brown and continue the
colonial practice of hegemonic exploitation unabated?

Our English-language writers, having in the past few

years made a bit of a name for themselves in Europe and the
United States, have come to believe, and of course their
Western reviewers and scholars have encouraged this view, that
they alone "represent'" the country, that theirs is the "authentic"
and "Qbjective" rendering of the state of its society. Yet only
two to three per cent of Pakistan's total population, perhaps, is
able to read the books by these much-touted celebrities. Their
actual readership is indeed a modicum of that percentage. Isn't
there something odd in that claim of representation then? For all
the effort that some foreign publishers are putting into
promoting/marketing the work of these writers in Pakistan
through literary festivals, the fact remains that only a very small
and select crowd, that belongs pretty much to a certain
privileged elite, attends these events, and commends and
compliments it in writing. The local languages, except to an
extent Urdu, continue in the subsidiary position they were
relegated to during the times of the British in India. Urdu,
however, for whatever this information is worth, enjoyed a
special status under the British colonial rule too, for the British
made a special effort to popularize it as a link language for the
commonality all across India.
~xplorationli 2015 109

And here is my cue to enter this piece of writing in

person. I have nothing at all against any language. All
languages, I feel, are effective, efficient, and beautiful for the
people who speak them. I just don't think that any tongue in a
richly multilingual country can lay claim to representing or
speaking for all the linguistic groups in that country. Or, for the
various groups and classes that exist within a society. And if it
makes that claim, it is doing so by taking away the power from
the people to speak for themselves in their own language or
idiom, or a language of their choice, in their own way. This is
such an obvious fact, that it does not need. any iteration
whatsoever. The question of who represents whom, and to what
extent, if at all, is entirely related to the troublesome issue of
identity, individual as much as collective identity (if there is, in
a definitive sense, any such thing), and language, one's mother
tongue, one's natural mode of communication, even the
vernacular or patois, is intimately connected to what individuals
and communities experience as their identity, a perpetually
evolving and dynamic concept, by no means static and
unchanging at all. But not until the sense of this spontaneously
evolving identity is threatened or perplexed, does the need arise
to recover and define it in some specific and conclusive way,
which, ironically, is a self-defeating exercise, since it tries to
give static shape and contours to something that is vital and
dynamic. Yet, in marginalizing a language, or imposing one
from the center, precisely that threat or befuddlement is created
which provokes people to disaffection, protest, and calls for
autonomy, with the insistent pressure and provocation to define
their distinctiveness in some final or absolute way. Without the
freedom to use one's own language as a matter of course, the
right to education in it, and the opportunity to make a living
based on that education there is no self-esteem, no pride of
identity or ownership of place, no sense of home, for a person.
If anything, this was the promise implicit in the struggle for
independence from colonial rule. Each citizen of a free country
should, in real terms, and as a matter of course, have the
opportunity to experience the fulfillment of this promise, of
self-fulfillment, if you will, on one's own terms, as long as it
does not encroach upon or abbreviate similar rights of others
QExplorations 2015 110

irrespective of gender, class, race, religion, color, or creed.

There can be no home or homeland where this promise is
ignored or betrayed. Unfortunately, the culture of privileged
communities, of language, class, gender, religion, ethnic origin,
tribal or clan loyalty, elitist affiliation (military or civilian), and
the like, does exactly this. It is a culture based on exclusion,
exclusion, exclusion. A home is not a home unless it is
inclusive, a source of strength, security, and reassurance for all
who live under its roof.
<!Explorations 2015 111

Poems

Cogito

Dancing around
in spiral circles,
the ground beneath my feet
is hard to feel and see.
So Ijust say, where I am,
there the centre shall be!

When I stop
the moments seem
to halt in their tracks,
and my shadows outnumber
the lights around me.
So Ijust say, where I am,
there the centre may well be!

Then and Now!

Half a world away

I live frozen in time.
Memories flood back:
a woman crying by the pond;
a clumsy snowman;
evenings of pleasant forgetfulness;
raindrops trembling on the windscreen;
a mind overwhelmed with hazy truths,
with loves that perhaps never were.

I now wear many rings,

socks with holes,
and my heart on the sleeve;
make a friend or two
in strange places;
write poetry in three languages -
 ~xplorlltion5' 2015 112

struggling with the lines of a poem till

the pen dries up
or my fingers begin to fail,
and wondering when I'll run out of words,
or dignity.

Dr. Anjum P. Saleemi

Blue is a Vicious Color

She waited beside the Yamuna

for the celestial;
anklet chiming as
her feet danced with the streaming water.
An unheard melody
impelled stones and leaves to breathe.
Far away, the sluggish orange
drowned slowly: amorphous in the restless turquoise.
It was time.
For the Blue to take over.
The night beamed
with fireworks.
Unbound, Radha ceased to exist.
Eternity was his frolic, fueled
with virgin golden locks.
But Blue is a vicious color,
Toxic and Hungry.
He demands blood be disguised in red.
Alas! Blood is the only abundance.
There came another renderer, epic
in her passion.
Meera would wear richer anklets and dance
Like a eunuch,
Ignored!
Praised!
Discarded!
Desired!
like a trinket in the hands of a greedy old woman.
But the discontent Blue pined for more
Qfxploration!, 2015 113

like a black hole, never to be filled, yet

with the gravest pull.
He relished the smell of burning flesh,
The sight of bruised pride delighted him.
She would extract salt from her eyes, mix it
with gore and
cleanse the stone.
She would wait for the unyielding rock
to turn human.
Still obstinate.
One afternoon, Meera was undone.
Stone eyes became those of Medusa's and
she became a stone herself.
The Blue devoured the red.
Because Blue is a vicious color,
Toxic and Hungry ...

Komal Nazir

On Living
I feel not any pain
For I am dead inside
And for the dead
It's all equal
Be it pleasure
Or pain.
I can feel the words though
I can't escape their echo
And the words tell me
'What a pleasant day it is today!'
Q1;xplorations 2015 114

Sojourn
liang
For it
To be
Too short.

Mahrukh Nishat.
€xplorations 2015 115

BookReview

The Heart Goes Last

Margaret Atwood

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2015

Margaret Atwood has long been considered one of the

pioneers of speculative fiction, thanks to her masterpiece The
Handmaid's Tale, which is rightfully considered a seminal text
in the genre. Throughout her significant and prolific career,
Atwood has delivered a biting critique on society through her
meticulous and skillfully produced dystopias, which are often
chilling in how precisely they mirror the advancements in the
modem world and their true cost. She is here to remind us that
we have carelessly ransacked the resources at our disposal and
the cheque is coming up. In keeping with her body of work, The
Heart Goes Last carries on her tradition of uncompromising
satire. Though it tackles her preferred themes of environmental
depletion, the desperation of humankind to protect itself from
its own actions, and the oft-dire consequences of thoughtless
social and scientific experimentation, the tone veers more
towards the comic in this book than any other found in her
repertoire.

We are introduced to Stan and Charmaine- no second

names- our despairing protagonists, living in filth out of their
car after having lost all of their worldly possessions to an
economic crash that precedes the events of the novel. The
reader can easily substitute each of these two characters for the
everyman or everywoman; therefore, they become perfunctory
vehicles for Atwood's commentary, unlike the masterfully
wrought flesh and bone characterization that can be found in
works like Blind Assassin or Alias Grace. Nevertheless, they
remain entirely human, perhaps because they are so ordinary:
she misses her homely knick-knacks, he feels his masculinity
has failed him. Their social conditions are bleak, to say the very
(1fxplorationll 2015 116

least. Surrounded by petty crimes that run the gamut from

violent theft to prostitution, their desperate circumstances are
made even more painfully evident through the means they have
to employ simply in order to survive, such as selling blood and
rummaging for scraps. The fact that this does not seem like
some farfetched post-apocalypse, but instead is an increasingly
common reality for millions of impoverished across the world,
makes the scene all the more hard to swallow.

In their naivete, they have created a myth out of their

love and attributed it with the power to protect them from their
truly miserable actuality. On the verge of making irrevocably
damaging decisions due to their fraught existence, the central
characters are saved by a seemingly harmless advertisement for
a groundbreaking new social experiment- the Positron Project.
In Consilience, the town where the said experiment is to be
conducted housed, Stan and Charmaine will enter a proverbial
brave new world. This world is clinical in its detachment from
the chaos they presently navigate and struggle to survive in; it is
through a world of pristine 50's style homes with picket fences
and an excess of food. This plenitude of alien comforts allows
them to initially ignore the suspect activities taking place in the
town. Expecting a safe future within grasp, they even accept the
bizarre terms of residence: they must alternate living between
their house and the Positron prison every other month.

However, the telltale signs of the sickness concealed

beneath the neat suburban far,;ade are present from the very
beginning: there is no way of receiving or sending news to and
from the outside world and no internet access, for instance.
They are told that there are no actual prisoners; however,
Charmaine is given the duties of an executioner. Gradually, the
protagonists are exposed to the nefarious nature of the place
they've chosen to call home and come to realize it is not the
dream house they imagined. Faced with this reality, their
relationship undergoes a radical change as they both react to
their newfound knowledge in different ways- when the pressing
threats of the outside world are removed their unshakeable bond
dissolves into infidelity and deception. This in turn is a mirror
to the atmosphere at Consilience, where nothing is as it seems.
'!Exploratiolls 2015 117

According to M John Harrison, in The Heart Goes Last

"Atwood allows her sense of the absurd its full elbow room; her
cheerfully caustic contempt - bestowed even-handedly on
contemporary economics, retro culture, and the social and.
neurological determination of identity - goes unrestrained.""
This absurdism is aided by the often breathless pace of the
novel, which at certain points seems ready to unravel, but is
never allowed to do so by a writer who is exceptional precisely
because of her ability to juggle multiple narratives within the
scope of a single book. Though it may not be one of her finest,
the novel effectively serves as a persuasive warning against
blind servitude to economic determinism, one that is ever the
timelier in the present age.

Azka Shahid

MA English Year II
Department of English
GC University, Lahore.

i Initially a series on Byliner (online platform), 2012-2013; increased to

I10vellength and published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing
n "The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood review - rewardingly strange"
in The Guardian.
(txplorations 2015 1I8

Explorations is an annual literary and research journal of

the Department of English Language and Literature at GC
University Lahore. The journal accepts articles and reviews
which have not been published previously and are research
based and innovative. In the articles submitted for
publication, the MLA documentation style is to be followed
as described in the MLA style manual. The word limit for
articles is 5000-7000 words, with an abstract of upto 300
words; containing the consent letter of the author, with
permission to re-edit the submitted article as per policies of
Explorations. Authors are responsible for reading and
correcting proof.

.'