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Still Thinking
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From At the Root of this Longing - Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst,
Initially, I don't think I framed my vacillations over nurturance and womanhood in terms of feminism. The closest I came to doing so was when I was wavering over whether to include in the introduction to Laurel's Kitchen a glimpse of South Indian village life: "Every evening, as the sun set, one of the women of our family would light an oil lamp, and as she carried it out to the veranda, everyone would look up in quiet delight to see her soft black eyes and warm brown skin glowing above the polished brass lamp. The beauty of this simple ritual made unforgettable the words Granny used to repeat time and time again: "Be a lamp in your home, my daughters - be a lamp to everyone around you." I knew very well that images of this sort were under severe scrutiny by feminist critics. I knew how double-edged and dangerous to women the "angel in the house" motif was that poet Conventry Patmore had made so popular in Victorian life and thought. I knew it had required women to stay in their houses and be angels precisely so that men could raise hell everywhere else; that it imposed a superhuman purity on women that was in some way supposed to offset the incorrigible naughtiness of their empire-building male counterparts; that by defining women as caregivers to the exclusion of all else, it barred them from becoming proficient in any other area of life and blinded them to the terrible iniquities of the colonial policies that had built and over furnished the houses they maintained. I knew some of the appalling effects of this kind of arrangement can have on women's life, and I knew enough about other cultures, including India's, to know that this pattern of cruelly unfair expectations is not limited to British or American family structures. I knew all of that, and I thought hard about the decision. But finally I did include this cameo glimpse of Kerala womanhood because... I think because I knew that if I had tried to explain my reservations to the Kerala women in question (and in fact I had met a half dozen of them), they would have shaken their heads in disbelief and laughed and laughed and laughed. I didn't know exactly what it was, but I was pretty certain these women had hold of something that was still eluding Western feminist analysis. |