Feminist Fables… Unprincess and Girls to the Rescue..

Feminist Fables… Unprincess and Girls to the Rescue..

I have borrowed the title beginning from Suniti Namjoshi’s fabulous Feminist Fables. (a lovely read but adults may enjoy that more). However, what were those stories or fairy-tales or fables that we grew up reading- those of the princesses as damsels in distress, waiting for the prince, or fairies, or frogs or whomsoever, but never taking “agency” or acting on their own. Often as a child I used to think- but they were princesses… with all that they could have? Why do they never do anything, except being dragged around, kidnapped, rescued, tortured, scared (by wolves and their kind), and above all…in one story checked their “princesshood and its reality” by being made to sleep on layers of mattresses with a pea pod beneath or a hair strand…The real princess has to be sensitive about the small hair strand and unable to sleep, lest the prince be betrayed by a strong-willed woman, irreverent about hair strands and blue eyes.

However, in recent days, we can see winds of change. Children can cherish and so can we all… to read about Unprincesses.

As Manjula Padmanavan writes about prince and princesses in her collection of 3 stories Unprincess of 3 feisty girls- when confronted with a problem

“being princesses there was only one thing they could really do well in a crisis.  And that was to scream and cry and so they did……..meanwhile there were little boys who were princes. But no one had taught them how to deal with giants (read problems) of the type that attack school buses. Being princes they knew that the only right and honorable course of action to take in the situations they had not been trained to face was to play some sort of game. So they all whipped out their trusty Nintendos and Game Boys. And they played with ferocious zeal known only to those whose lives are endangered by situations they have not yet been trained to face”.

Manjula here says things in an extremely light-hearted way, but doesn’t it resonate so well with the patriarchy.. how often men laugh about and stay out of situations at home, saying those are domestic, feminine issues and we should not interfere.

Manjula creates her heroine Kavita as the unprincess who “ had not been born with her instructions for life already arranged neatly inside her brain even before she had learnt to understand speech. She had to stop and think before she acted. And so she frequently did so.”

Kavita was the unprincess, freed from the social conditioning, the burden of obedience. She believed in having a mind of her own and that made her un-disneyfied, the “Unprincess”.

All the 3 stories are unique and challenges stereotypes, part fantasy, part science fiction and with wonderful illustrations, Unprincess is a wonderful read for all. The story Urmila the Ultimate in fact is even more stark. Urmila from the beginning of the story is said to be “ugly”, a burden her parents are oblivious of. They prefer an unsocial life rather than considering Urmila ugly.  In fact the most heart-warming part of the story is , when in a bizarre incident someone openly tells her parents about her ugliness and the distress it causes to others, tipping the world off its feet, this is what her parents hgad to say- “ She is too unique to be contained by mere laws and statutes….if the rest of the world doesn’t appreciate your appearance that’s their problem, not ours! You look perfectly wonderful to us, and that’s what counts!.... I hope you realize that we, your parents, value you for what you are, and don’t care a fig for the bourgeois notions of beauty that appear to exercise the minds of everyone we know.”.

In real world, lets hope such parents are more, who get the courage to embrace their children, their daughters as they are.. since its high time Unprincesses are encouraged to be as they are and to claim their piece of world.

Sowmya Rajendran’s Girls to the Rescue is another interesting read. Sowmya, feels “ princesses are mega bores. They simply wait.. for the prince, even for someone to find their shoes, waiting for the world to turn better..” Sowmya knows that none of us have that kind of patience. So she decides to twist the tales of the princesses. She gives them the might and they claim their rights..

Hence Rapunzel’s father is a barber who thinks she should have long hair, while her mother’s an astronaut. Rapunzel is locked lest she cuts off her tresses, which she does on her own. The prince, poor thing already burdened with the expectations of his king-father of him becoming a warrior, while he loves slow dance and studying beetles, just happens to pass off his sword. And yes Rapunzel, does make him her friend, but “ to enjoy the moment”.

And Sleeping Beauty- well she happens to take birth with the king and queen literally blackmailed by all to have a baby of their own. The Queen has dreams of her own, to finish her book on botany, but how to manage with a baby whose biological clock never sets to  let her sleep. There comes the mad fairy to make the baby sleep, till the mother gets over her post-partum anxiety and manager her career and ambition.

These books are such breath of fresh air. A Must read for all and thanks.. stories are changing…

The Vegetarian-Agency, Violence and the Surreal

The Vegetarian By Han Kang

"‘I didn’t, you see. I thought trees stood up straight … I only found out just now. They actually stand with both arms in the earth, all of them. Look, look over there, aren’t you surprised?’ Yeong-hye sprang up and pointed to the window. ‘All of them, they’re all standing on their heads.’ Yeong-hye laughed frantically. In-hye remembered" (from "Vegetarian: A Novel" by Han Kang)

The above is exclaimed by Yeong-Hye supposed to be delirious and schizophrenic who refuses to eat to her elder sister In-Hye. And as this quote grips me, embrace me, I struggle to interpret it- As I often speak about layers, this speaks to me in layers, from multiple angles- the agency of Yeong_hye or that of any woman which is almost absent and often are said to make choices in coercion. Or it is the way we want to look into things, our empathy and being one with them engulfs us wholly that it destroys us- however Yeong-Hye questions this tragedy asking, why is it so sad to die?

And when did all these things start? From the moment Yeong- Hye married for the last 5 years, a docile, almost insignificant house-wife, whom her husband dismisses at the beginning of the novel as to be completely unremarkable in every way takes the decision of becoming a vegetarian and gives up eating meat. All hell breaks loose. In fact it becomes unfathomable and unacceptable to the husband, as well as to her own parents, siblings.  Her husband almost starts thinking himself as a victim, being denied of being served non-vegetarian food and of course of sex. Yeong-Hye refuses physical relationship stating his sweat smells of meat which is abhorring to her. However that doesn’t stop Mr. Cheong to violate her wishes. And this violence goes on throughout the book.  In fact Han Kang doesn’t give any voice to Yeong-Hye throughout the novel.  Her thoughts are just italicized, as some soliloquys within herself. 

However Yeong- Hye though is an omnipresent character in the book, the entire novel is written in 3 parts, where the narrator changes from the first part being Mr. Cheong, Hye’s husband, amazed at his own victimhood (that’s how he speaks about these incidences), to In-Hye’s (Yeong Hye’s elder sister) husband. He gets enamored with Yeong- Hye, now divorced and under medication, post suicidal trauma. In fact consent is something constantly questioned in the novel. In-Hye seems to be much surer and successful than her artist husband, who find In-Hye’s goodness almost oppressive.   Its not his relationship with Yeong- Hye that makes In-Hye turn against him. She thinks him to be manipulative and selfish, who never thought that Yeong-Hye is unwell and under medication- and this relationship is again violation of her rights to be in an “agency to decide”. And this is when the third and final part of the novel starts. In In-Hye’s voice. Suddenly the successful business woman, the only woman in the novel who earns her living, takes care of the family, leads a cosmetic chain and has a voice as a narrator.. feels the futility of her own self. Questions why she had not raised her voice earlier, when her father tried to force-feed meat to Yeong-Hye? Why now- when her own husband is in the act? Is it a personal deceit that she is trying to hide in form of love or concern..

As she reminisces about their childhood, when one day the two sisters losing their way in the mountains, Yeong-Hye shared the happy possibility of never being able to trace her way back home… that revelation dawns upon her..

"Only after all this time was she able to understand why Yeong-hye had said what she did. Yeong-hye had been the only victim of their father’s beatings. Such violence wouldn’t have bothered their brother Yeong-ho so much, a boy who went around doling out his own rough justice to the village children. As the eldest daughter, In-hye had been the one who took over from their exhausted mother and made a broth for her father to wash the liquor down, and so he’d always taken a certain care in his dealings with her. Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their father’s temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.  Could I have prevented it? Could I have prevented those unimaginable things from sinking so deep inside of Yeong-hye and holding her in their grip? She saw her sister again, as a child, her back and shoulders and the back of her head as she stood alone in front of the main gate at sunset. The two of them had eventually made it down off the mountain, but on the opposite side from where they’d started. They’d hitched a ride on a power tiller back to their small town, hurrying along the unfamiliar road as darkness fell. In-hye had been relieved, but not her sister."

She questions the reason of her conformity, so long, to the parents, to the family, to the husband.. to look at success in this manner.. whereas what does Yeong Hye do in her schizophrenia, giving up meat and then wanting to be the tree, with hands in the ground, lest the hands become something else tugging at flesh, plucking and seizing from others.. an act of violence.. Well non-violence did lead to her death…

The Vegetarian is actually a first of its kind novel for me, surreal in a sense. In fact its difficult for me to describe the feeling. And of course I am looking at it from the angle of women and agency in the Asian context. However also it reflects on the effect of trying to change the norms or ways of “oppression” (may be), at refusing to violate rights, be it that of the animals or the plants, to rid one-self of the carnal desires- the state of Yeong-Hye, from being the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire..to becoming a body void of any desire… metaphorically death and that’s what came to Yeong Hye.