Women Writers

Dedication of the Cook
Anna Wickham(1884-1947)
If any ask why there’s no great She-Poet,
Let him come live with me, and he will know it:
If I’d indite an ode or mend a sonnet,
I must go choose a dish or tie a bonnet,
For she who serves in forced virginity
Since I am wedded will not leave me free;
And those new flowers my garden is so rich in
Must die for clammy odors of my kitchen.

We all know that one good impact of the second wave of women’s movement in 1960s is the “awakening” of women writers. Many literary works written by women writers in the previous decades and centuries have been dug out again and republished so that they can be read again by the following generation of readers. Some names ‘resurrected’ by this women’s movement, for example, are Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Anna Wickham, etc. Those names, then, accompanied some other women writers who have been long acknowledged before, such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, etc.
As one proof that women critics are serious to boost women’s works is the publication of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar as the company of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and some other anthologies published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
It is indeed undeniable that the impact of women’s movement is more and more women have career outside home, not just become the angel of the house, or the doll of the house. More and more women are economically independent. They can choose any profession they are attracted to do, and not just be a homemaker, doing household chores, ranging from cooking, sewing, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, until serving the husband. They have more time to do anything they like.
If this is related to the first stanza of Wickham’s poem above, it is understandable why in the past women couldn’t become a great poet, such as William Wordsworth from England, or Walt Whitman from America; couldn’t become a great dramatist such as William Shakespeare. In the past, most women were busy doing the “burden” given to their shoulder, such taking care of their children to prepare them as the good following generation to lead the country, cooking the best food coz the children needed good nutrition, taking care of their husband who were busy doing their business outside home. How could they have time to write good poems or plays or novels? We know that great women writers such as George Eliot, the Bronte’s sisters, and Emily Dickinson were never married during their lifetime.
In this twenty first century, where writing is no longer exclusively “occupied” by men, I am pretty sure that there will be more and more women writers born. In her A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf stated that “Books continue each other.” There will be no more “mainstream” literature defined by men only. No more women need to use male pseudonym (just like George Eliot or the Bronte’s sisters) only to make their writings accepted by society.
For myself, thanks to blog technology that has made me a writer. :)

KPDE 12.29 200907

Sastrawan vs Sastrawan

Beberapa bulan lalu, seorang teman—sebut saja namanya Celia—yang sekarang sedang menimba ilmu di Kansas University mengambil jurusan “English Literature” di tingkat Master’s Degree menelponku. Celia sebenarnya telah menyelesaikan studinya di jenjang Magister jurusan “Susastra” di Universitas Diponegoro. Untuk tesisnya waktu itu dia meneliti “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” karya D.H. Lawrence dengan berangkat dari teori feminisme dalam memandang konflik dalam diri Lady Chatterley. Di telpon dia bercerita tentang salah satu tesis yang dia baca dengan topik yang mirip dengan tesisnya di Kansas University. Yang membuat Celia sangat tertarik adalah penemuan si penulis tesis akan adanya anal sex yang dilakukan oleh Lady Chatterley dengan kekasih gelapnya.
“How brilliant the writer of the thesis is. She could come to that conclusion only from what the lady’s lover said, ‘I love and admire your ass.’ And when remembering again the whole story, i couldn’t agree more with her in this part.”
Kemudian aku bertanya kepadanya,
“If you had come to that conclusion too in your research, would you write that in your thesis?”
Celia terdiam beberapa saat dan akhirnya mengatakan,
“Maybe not. I am too shy to write such a thing in my thesis.”
I commented,
“You got my point there. You know it is all because of our eastern culture. Even in doing scientific research, we oftentimes have to consider which is taboo and which is appropriate to write. And I remember what you said about your thesis advisor who was a flirt. I related his being flirt to you with the topic of your thesis—a woman’s right to get her happiness by having a secret lover because she did not love her husband. With your viewing it from feministic perspective, your thesis advisor viewed you differently too. I was quite sure that he was just a patriarchal man who believed in the stereotyping of good women and bad women.”
And due to that, Celia gave me a compliment, “That’s why I always think that you deserve more to be here, to get this scholarship, than me. You are more alert than me.” LOL.
Di awal penerbitan Lady Chatterley’s Lover, publik pun mengecamnya sebagai karya sampah dari seorang novelis terkenal yang hanya memaparkan pornografi semata. Menghadapi tuduhan tersebut, Lawrence berargumen:

“The mind has an old grovelling fear of the body and the body’s potencies. It is the mind we have to liberate, to civilize on these points. ... I stick to my book and my position: Life is only bearable when the mind the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between them, and each has a natural respect for the other.”

Membaca debat kusir di milis tentang sastrawan versus sastrawan beberapa hari terakhir ini mengingatkanku pada perbincangan pendek antara aku dan Celia ini. Begitu mudah orang menjatuhkan ‘predikat’ yang biasanya ditujukan kepada satu kelompok penulis lain yang tidak ‘sealiran’—misal, sastra wangi, sastra lendir, atau mungkin karya murahan untuk menaikkan pamor. Orang-orang yang merasa lebih berhak untuk menyandang predikat ‘sastrawan’ dan mem-blacklist kelompok lain. Dan untuk berpolemik masalah seperti ini, emosi pun ikut berbicara. Mungkin memang benar apa kata Abang, keadaan Indonesia yang sedang ditimpa beragam masalah telah membuat orang-orang—termasuk para ‘sastrawan’—untuk membiarkan emosinya tersulut secara tak terkendali.
Mengacu ke tulisan yang kupost sebelum ini, biarlah masyarakat yang akan menjatuhkan pilihan, karya sastra macam mana yang akan mereka baca
PT56 11.11 200907

High Literature vs Popular Literature

In “Popular Literature” class—when I was a student at American Studies Gadjah Mada University majoring ‘American Literature and Culture’—my classmates and I used to have lively discussion on “dichotomy” of popular literature—often considered as low quality literature—versus high-brow literature. Why should this dichotomy exist? Who has privilege to decide which kind of literature is considered pop and which is high? And why should some people feel that they have that privilege?
Some literary critics said that when a work was produced only to follow what public wanted to read—just for fun or entertainment, no “deep meaning” under the surface of the story—then it would be categorized into “pop literature”. In addition to that, people also said the work was only for commercial’s need, because the writer needed money when writing. On the contrary, when a work was produced not only to follow public’s needs, it was written more to fulfill the writer’s ambition to communicate “something important” to readers, so that the work had “deep meaning”, then the work could be categorized into “high-brow literature”.
However, when talking about Jack London’s works, who would say that his works do not have deep meaning whereas London himself said that he wrote them only for money? Literary critics even classified London’s works into high-brow literature.
Besides that, critics said that the parameter of high-brow literature was when one work deserved to be included into canon. The canon here usually refers to “big anthologies” such as Norton Anthology, Heath Anthology, etc. Again, I want to ask, who has privilege to select which works to be included into those anthologies?
The publication of THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF LITERATURE BY WOMEN can be considered one way of women’s struggle to include women’s works into high-brow literature. In the ‘preface’ of its first edition published in 1985, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar wrote:

“… no single anthology has represented the exuberant variety yet strong continuity of the literature that English speaking women have produced between the fourteenth century and the present. In the NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF LITERATURE BY WOMEN, we are attempting to do just that.”

“Complementing and supplementing the standard Norton anthologies of English and American literature, NALW should help readers for the first time to appreciate fully the female literary tradition which, for several centuries, has coexisted with, revised, and influenced male literary models.”

Furthermore, in the sixth edition of The Norton Anthology of American Literature appearing in the beginning of the twenty first century, Nina Baym, the general editor, stated in the preface:

“That the “untraditional” authors listed above have now become part of the American literary canon shows that canons are not fixed, but emerge and change.”

It can be included that in the long run dichotomy of pop and high literature will disappear peacefully. It is up to public to value and to choose which works they will read. I am of opinion that in society where people are mature enough to choose which works to read, bad writings will be left behind.

P.S.: This article was written to ‘answer’ my Abang’s challenge, related to the hot topic on the polemic of two sides—the community of TUK versus the community that is against it.PT56 21.40 190907