How impossible, unattainable ideal images pin down the educated and liberated women of today’s world.
In Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, Nastenka was 15 years old when she got into some minor, banal mischief. When her blind grandmother learnt about it, with whom she was living alone, she called her, took a safety pin, and fastened Nastenka’s dress to hers. Life from then on meant living under her possession. She had to do everything by being pinned to her – sewing, knitting, embroidering, sleeping, reading, studying. Like an unavoidable shadow, from which there is no escape, her grandmother loomed over her life, curtailing her movement, determining her life. The grief over such a life comes as she wonders with deep melancholia – is this even a way to live a life? To be pinned to someone puts a threat over one’s being that cannot independently exist in the world. Dostoyevsky’s metaphorical usage of Nastenka being pinned defines the predicament faced by women, pushing us to ask about the nature of pinning.
The feminist movements have struggled hard to confront the inescapability of a milieu that has chained women. Thanks to this struggle that the women of this world enjoy relatively more freedom and exercise choice in their movement, clothing, career, partner and other life concerns. However, at the first quarter of the 21st century, what is the nature of pinning that women experience is a question that, as social scientists, we should be interested in.
Today’s educated, English-speaking, urbane, assured women might not be explicitly pinned to their familial and social milieu like Nastenka, but they probably are tied to something far stronger, which comes in the form of an image. They are pinned to this impossible, larger-than-life mythological creature – image of this successful, calm, composed, working woman who is also at the centre of a happy, healthy, harmonious home. She demonstrates neither a wrinkle nor a crease, either in her appearance or in her psyche, while seamlessly managing her work as efficiently as her home and hearth. She haunts us, the so-called liberated and educated women, to the extent that our exhaustion can be experienced in the prominent guilt of not adequately looking after our children and homes, as well as in our frustration over the unattained passions and dreams that had been long cherished. Ironically, the impossibility of attaining this image further adds to its charm and doesn’t render it as a castaway. Instead of demonstrating the regressive nature of these images, which have only further underpinned the oppressive orders and norms of patriarchy, Alenka Zupancic, the Slovenian psychoanalyst, puts forth a far stronger, powerful claim of psychoanalysis – Who is this woman that you are talking about? Does she even exist?
Once my first emotion of grief over Nastenka’s plight was over, I found myself being jealous of her, as, unlike us, she knew what she had to unpin herself from. We are fastened not to an old, blind grandmother, but to a poised woman, who is nothing but a figment of an imaginary realm. Instead of being Abhimanyus, who battled against the obstacles thrown at him by his own kinsmen, we, the Nastenkas of today’s world, look more like Don Quixote, fighting unknown demons and enemies, only to be dismissed as delusional. To be pinned and possessed by an impossible image has turned the external control inwards, as women put sanctions on themselves on their own, submitting in ways not thought of earlier. Far from exceeding control over their bodies, this implicit and insidious control works on their souls. While this form of implicit control over the subject through ideal images has always accompanied all power structures, it has today allowed patriarchy to blur and invisibilize the real adversary, making it increasingly difficult to address it.
Instead of earlier silences and refusal to address the challenges faced by women, patriarchy today makes strong announcements and declarations about the predicament faced by women. Bordering on empty speech, this know-it-all patriarchy is marked by an incessant jabber on questions of gender, sexism, free will and choice. Instead of invisibilizing women, pushing them to the periphery and excluding them, the patriarchal trope today has included women and made them the centre. Ironically, it is this very claim of knowing the problem that sustains and emboldens patriarchy. Understanding this complex process, Zupancic points out how the regressive regimes of the 21st century have refined their earlier brutal mechanisms of denial and repression with disavowal – an ability to maintain the status quo not by denying the problem, but by exercising a claim over it. It is this disavowal exercised by patriarchy that has seemingly softened its earlier blow by co-opting the progressive language of feminism, turning the much-desired, valued goals of free will and choice work against itself. Demonstrating an awareness of the problem seems to have also relieved the present political sphere from any compulsion to address its real contradictions. The sheer talk and articulations of the usual empty rhetoric give it a sanction to go on as before, raising fundamental questions about our present vacuous political sphere. It poses a conundrum for education, as knowledge of the problem, instead of challenging the oppressive structures, strengthens them further by allowing them to disavow the real problems of real people.
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Jyoti Dalal is a Professor at the Institute of Home Economics, University of Delhi and the current President of the Comparative Education Society of India (CESI).