I told my mother that, if a woman did not become angry at injustice, she would not be human. Those are the words of Nawal el Saadawi, the Egyptian feminist writer who has braved prison, exile and death threats in her fight against female oppression.
El Saadawi is not alone. Closer home, Grace Ogot exposed the plight of the girl chid in The Bamboo Hut; Marjorie Oludhe MacGoye explored possibilities in the development of an abused woman’s life at different stages in Coming to Birth.
Margaret Ogolla’s female characters in The River and the Source managed to live powerfully through their pre- and post-colonial experiences. She projected women characters as strong and able to transcend male domination.
Certainly, women in Kenya and around the world have tried to make strides towards equity.
However, what is clear is that even though they have made great strides in reducing sexism, our society is still highly patriarchal, as evidenced by the machismo in the recent times.
Indeed, this has brought into sharp focus the question of the woman’s place in our society.
If the events in the recent times are anything to by, there is no doubt that women’s value is, still ensured by fertility, the man’s virility notwithstanding.
At the family level, close and trusted family members are abusing little girls only for a compromise to be struck by elders as punishment for the offender — a cow or two paid as compensation!
Heinous acts
Trapped, women have resorted to the unthinkable, with some slashing their husbands/partners as they sleep.
I dare say that those who have not committed the heinous acts have had dark thoughts, imagining all kinds of scenarios, the way Mrs Louise Mallard, the main character — a young woman “with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression,” in Kate Chopin’s The Story of the Hour does.
In The Story of the Hour, Mrs Mallard’s husband has gone on a trip.
It is reported that he, Mr Mallard, has been involved in an accident and died. His friend, Mr Richards, gets to know of the sad news and he informs Josephine − Mrs. Mallard’s sister, and together they go to tell Mrs Mallard about the accident.
They try to break the news to her as gently as they can because they are aware that she has a heart problem.
When they finally do, she does “not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralysed inability to accept its significance.” She weeps at once, with sudden, wild abandonment.
She then asks to go to her bedroom where she would like to be alone.
While there, she gazes through the open bedroom window, and suddenly in her mind she sees all the possibilities that her new statues as a”‘free woman,” not a widow, will bring.
At first, she tries to resist this feeling but she allows it sweep over her. She whispers “free, free, free!” She feels that with the new-found freedom, she will know nothing but happiness, with ”no powerful will bending her” to do its bidding. She concedes that she loved her husband “sometimes” but what matters presently is not guilt the that may gnaw at her conscience, but that she is free.
Josephine feels that her sister has taken rather long in her bedroom. Worried, she pounds Mrs Mallard’s bedroom door begging her to open it.
Mrs Mallard tells Josephine that she is okay and that she (Josephine) should go away. In reality, she wants to experience her “wondrous” state for a while longer.
Josephine insists and Mrs Mallard opens the door. As they go downstairs, the front door opens and in comes Mr Mallard! He he is not dead after all!
On seeing him, Mrs Mallard screams, collapses and dies!
One would argue that his return portended the homecoming of repression, oppression and lack of freedom that Mrs Mallard had suffered.
Her state epitomises the inherent oppressiveness that women sometimes face. This is what has been brought to the fore in recent times when Kenyan women have had to suffer the shame of being women, especially those whose are seen as unable to bring forth the fruit of their womb. One cannot help but think that even with modern-day feminism we still look at women through the lenses of fertility.
As if that is not enough, we think they are incapable of explicating their situation hence we “take charge” and explain their situation the way John, the husband of the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s haunting psychological horror The Yellow Wallpaper, does.
Gilman examines men’s exercise of will over women, most of whom suffer in silence as they think that their men are right, careful and caring. In The Yellow Wallpaper, John’s wife — the narrator — is seriously ill yet John who is a medical doctor does not take her complaints seriously.
He says she is not ill and that what she requires is rest. With this prescription, John proceeds to take her to a home where he keeps her in what appears to have been a nursery, with barred windows — a symbol of his viewing her as a child, and not allowing her to do anything intellectual including writing which, she does in secret.
She keeps a journal that is the story, The Yellow Wallpaper.
Trivial complaints
At first, John camouflages his actions, making the narrator think that they are all born out of his concern for her.
This is a position that she initially holds as she concedes in the journal: “He is very careful and loving...and hardly lets me stir without special direction.”
The reader, though, can observe that her words also seem to harbour a veiled complaint.
As the story progresses, the narrator realises that John is dismissing her with some irritability and considers her complains trivial.
When she laments that the wallpaper in her bedroom disturbs her, John says she is letting such a little thing “take the better of her” and refuses to pull it down. Even when she cries out of frustration, John considers it as being irrational and does not acknowledge her problems as being real. “John does not know how much I suffer,” she observes.
The protagonist becomes extremely obsessed with the wallpaper and tries to make sense out of its bizarre pattern.
However, instead of discerning the meaning behind the pattern, she thinks that there is a woman trapped behind it.
Her fervent study of the pattern does not yield much as she eventually losses her mind and decides to”‘join” the creeping woman behind the pattern.
She also becomes a “creeping woman” and together they later on pull down the wallpaper that can be seen as the oppressiveness that society saddles women with.
When John ees what she has done, he faints.
The protagonist keeps on creeping and stepping on John whom she now spitefully calls “a young man.”
Gilman seems to be saying that women should accept that they have a problem but they should not expect men to help them resolve it.
She seems to be telling women to look for solutions from within the problems that bedevil them.
Though John refused to pull down the wallpaper, the narrator used it as an escape after conceding, and also admitting that she was not the only one who was trapped when she says there are “so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.”
Though some have been at fault, we have to re-examine our treatment of women as we are fast destroying our social fabric by stripping them of their dignity.
