The first essay on Literature of the Girl! At first sight, these two novels seem to be without a great deal of overlap, but they do have one theme in common – relationships, and specifically, the liminal time before and while a girl is betrothed. I use betrothed for its dusty, weighty quality, hinting at a greater passivity than ‘to be wed’ or the more simple ‘to be married’. Liminal bridehood, a fitting topic for me, writing on the eve of my fourth wedding anniversary, holding up two books to the light. I see not the whole texts but this one part that links them – and I will write only a little of this part glass-deep. Just imagine the whole essay comes with a giant ‘FRAGILE’ sticker affixed to it. Caveats over, to begin:
+
The Tale of Genji – Wakamurasaki
The Tale of Genji may very well raise a few eyebrows at its inclusion on a list of Literature of the Girl, given that its central protagonist, Genji, is a man. Let’s fight about it, if you like. I’m including it more for the fact that it is an incredibly old novel which, for all its differences to modern literature, is still deeply concerned with the inner lives of its protagonists. And for its incredible, painstakingly slow pace and its beautiful detail. A novel like a hot, scented bath.
It was written in the eleventh century by a sole female author, known to us as Murasaki Shikibu or the Lady Murasaki, though she was given the name in memory of her character. The text was copied out by many hands along its near millennium of existence, and the history of its preservation, transmission and importance is absolutely fascinating from the little I have read – and way beyond the scope of this course. If nothing else, read Tyler’s introduction to the translation, which highlights some of the issues in tackling a work so old. In the chapter called Wakamurasaki, or ‘Young Murasaki’, Genji is eighteen, and suffering a recurring fever, has gone off to a mountain temple seeking healing. While there he hears of the daughter of a former Governor of the province who has fallen on hard times:
“My lord, I gather she has her share of both looks and character. I hear one Governor after another has respectfully shown interest in her, but her father rejects each one. […] ‘If you outlive me,’ he tells her, ‘if my hopes for you fail and the future I want for you is not to be, then you are to drown yourself in the sea.’ That, they say, is the solemn injunction he repeats to her.”
Genji was indeed amused.
“She must be a rare treasure then,” Someone said, laughing, “If her father means the Dragon King of the Sea to have her as his Queen!”
[…] “You’re enterprising enough in love,” one of them said, “You’d like to break her father’s solemn injunction yourself, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh yes, I’m sure he’s always lurking around her house!”
“Get on with you! She must be a country girl, whatever you say. Look at where she grew up, after all, with no one but her ancient parents to teach her anything!”
“No, no, her mother seems to be of excellent birth. Thanks to her relations she manages to get pretty young gentlewomen and page girls from the best families in the City, and she is bringing up her daughter in a grand style.”
[…]”I wonder what it means that his ambitions for her reach all the way to the bottom of the sea,” Genji mused. “It cannot be much fun down there, with all that seaweed.” He was keenly intrigued. His marked taste for the unusual ensured that he would remember her story, as his companions clearly noted.
Note his amusement at a father’s demand of suicide from his daughter if she be left without male guardianship. Amusement, it’s a hard word to judge, in translation and at a distance. I’m just pointing to things I find difficult here, and saying that to read this book casually is to be forced to be casual with mystery. Negative Capability, isn’t that the term? Comfort with things that are unGoogleable. At any rate, what of this girl, who has taken her place in the narrative unseen, like the most beautiful and fiercely-guarded princesses of a Grimm’s fairy tale?
Two handsome, grown-up women and some page girls were wandering in and out of the room. In among them came a girl of ten or so, wearing a softly rumpled kerria rose layering over a white gown and, unlike the other children, an obvious future beauty. Her hair cascaded like a spread fan behind her as she stood there, her face all red from crying.
“What is the matter?” The nun glanced up at her. “Have you quarrelled with one of the girls?” They looked so alike that Genji took them for mother and daughter.
“Inuki let my baby sparrow go! And I had him in his cage and everything!” Declared the indignant little girl.
[…]
“Oh, come, you are such a baby!” The nun protested. “You understand nothing do you! Here I am wondering whether I will last out this day or the next, but that means nothing to you does it! All you do is chase sparrows. Oh, dear, and I keep telling you it is a sin! Come here!”
The little girl sat down. She had a very dear face, and the faint arc of her eyebrows, the forehead from which she had childishly swept back her hair, and the hairline itself were extremely pretty. She is one I would like to see when she grows up! Genji thought, fascinated.
The girl is ten years old, a child, little, indignant, vulnerable. What we see of her is her surface, filtered through the expectations and impressions of what appears to be Genji – the third person narration blurry here: but who is judging the ‘very dear face’? Though it might be, as Tyler says, the author writing as if relaying her impressions to a mistress as entertainment. There are no shortages elsewhere of Genji’s own aesthetic superiority elsewhere in the text. Beauty and nobility and goodness in The Tale of Genji, as in Ancient Greek texts, as in modern life, are seen as going hand in hand.
However, it’s hard not to see the author’s choice to highlight the smallness and juvenile appearance of the girl here, in conflict with her perceived beauty. Her beauty as a beauty for the future, the girl still fretting about lost temporary pets, and elsewhere, her dolls. We are presented with no defense of what Genji wants. No defense, but no authorial condemnatory response either, just a voice saying, to someone, that that the girl is pretty and demonstrably, in the speech of the nun, evidence that she is a young girl emotionally unready to give up her girlhood for marriage.
What age did girls become brides in Murasaki’s time? Twelve? Later, the girl’s guardians will express confusion that Genji is interested at all, so we can see that at least to these characters, ten years old is outwith the boundary of social acceptability. But as son of the Emperor, even an illegitimate one with no claim to the throne, feels entitled to do as he wishes. After a little wrangling, Genji takes the girl home, and raises her as his daughter, only to consummate a marriage with her later, when she is fourteen or fifteen and he twenty-two (in chapter nine ‘Aoi’ or Heart-to-Heart). She becomes the great love of his life, and in the text, Murasaki appears to love him. How can we respond to fiction that is a thousand years old – the problematic issue of not-knowing comes into the fore, like veils upon veils. We stand where we stand, in 2013, thinking how abusive this is, while the author and all her society – who may have all thought so too, despite Genji’s godlike status – are so long since dust in the ground, lacking the luxury even of a text without corruptions or lacunae.
At any rate, we have in the book (and thanks to the footnotes this is clear) the fact that around Murasaki and Genji’s disturbing relationship stand many others – male and female servants, musicians and coach-drivers, ministers and friends, and Genji’s other wife and many lovers – broken-hearted or new. Through snippets of poetry, through the act of delivering delicate cakes or murmured gossip, we learn of what is occurring, and what efforts are gone to to save and console and uncover the thoughts of the otherwise silent child bride.
And now from this idea of presence as spur to action, we are able to draw a line across nearly a thousand years and nearly six thousand miles (and counting).
+
The Voyage Out
The Voyage Out (first published 1915) is the story of a group of upper-class English people (including a one Mrs Clarissa Dalloway, in her first literary appearance) as they make the lengthy journey from England to Brazil via ship. In such close confines, the dynamics of class and gender become strained to the point of screeching gears. Eyes and expectations are, just like in The Tale, everywhere. The closest character to the narration is at first Helen Ambrose, on board with her husband and her niece, Rachel. In an early form of the Woolfian way, there is a lot of flitting between characters and moods, verging on stream of consciousness, the judgements and raw feeling of the everyday.
And the recipient of some of Helen’s sternest judgement is Rachel. Young, tender, slightly numb Rachel, who gradually will become the centre of things. But not before the older generation has a go at her passivity:
“The last time I saw you, you were buying a piano,” she [Helen] continued. “Do you remember—the piano, the room in the attic, and the great plants with the prickles?”
“Yes, and my aunts said the piano would come through the floor, but at their age one wouldn’t mind being killed in the night?” she enquired.
“I heard from Aunt Bessie not long ago,” Helen stated. “She is afraid that you will spoil your arms if you insist upon so much practising.”
“The muscles of the forearm—and then one won’t marry?”
“She didn’t put it quite like that,” replied Mrs. Ambrose.
“Oh, no—of course she wouldn’t,” said Rachel with a sigh.
Helen looked at her. Her face was weak rather than decided, saved from insipidity by the large enquiring eyes; denied beauty, now that she was sheltered indoors, by the lack of colour and definite outline. Moreover, a hesitation in speaking, or rather a tendency to use the wrong words, made her seem more than normally incompetent for her years. Mrs. Ambrose, who had been speaking much at random, now reflected that she certainly did not look forward to the intimacy of three or four weeks on board ship which was threatened. Women of her own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls would be worse. She glanced at Rachel again. Yes! how clear it was that she would be vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water. There was nothing to take hold of in girls—nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory.
As in The Tale, there are filters, pluralities of voices which interfere in the text – and appear a necessary interference. It is the active other who makes a character out of the otherwise static girl, in this instance. The watched become images printed in the eye of the watchers. But what we find out about Rachel is what we find out about all Woolf’s heroines – that there is behind the stillness a great swarming depth, and the possibility of growth into awareness and accomplishment within the limits allowed for an upper class woman in 1913. At The same time, there is a sense that these characters are also archetypes of beings, set into certain paths. When a suitable husband figure arrives on the scene, it is time for Rachel to make her choice, a choice of two options, be wed, or not yet. And in the face of societal expectations, Woolf gives us something different to a simple happy acquiescence or fierce rejection.
Directly they landed, Terence and Rachel drew together slightly in advance of the others.
“Thank God!” Terence exclaimed, drawing a long breath. “At last we’re alone.”
“And if we keep ahead we can talk,” said Rachel.
Nevertheless, although their position some yards in advance of the others made it possible for them to say anything they chose, they were both silent.
“You love me?” Terence asked at length, breaking the silence painfully. To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for when they were silent they were keenly conscious of each other’s presence, and yet words were either too trivial or too large.
She murmured inarticulately, ending, “And you?”
“Yes, yes,” he replied; but there were so many things to be said, and now that they were alone it seemed necessary to bring themselves still more near, and to surmount a barrier which had grown up since they had last spoken. It was difficult, frightening even, oddly embarrassing.
It’s a modern kind of stiltedness. Like something from twenty-first century millennials writing in America. Overt self-consciousness, and love as less a declarative than a statement with a question mark left to dangle unanswered. How different to the assurance of the Wakamurasaki chapter. A dryness here instead that leaves a residue of melancholy on the fingers as you read. A sense, too, of a pained kind of nakedness – the absence of any protective irony that can be found in other comedies of marriage throughout the ages – that might speak to a lack of options coupling with a heightened, intelligent awareness of this lack, and a complete absence of alternatives. The two engaged people are like figures in a war, awaiting being shot at dawn, and who therefore do not have an enemy to fight nor even the usual bleak macabre humour to fall back on as defense. Marriage has been used as an end to comedies, but here it is an end to possibilities which never were.
And of course, having written herself into this corner, where can Woolf take the narrative other than into the death of possibility but into death itself?
I could go on and on awkwardly in my love for these two works. One showing surfaces and painful realities of being young, of being close to prey, the other of the numbness of being a girl at 24, sheltered and shunted along her single track. How both play out in as if on a stage – with everyone watching, eyeing their clothing, whispering who should be doing what or otherwise facilitating the show from lowly positions or great heights. How both show marriage as a terrible inevitability for a class I don’t belong to, living in an era and country where I was lucky enough to be free to choose out of love rather than duty.
But I can’t just keep going on. The word count is creeping up. Mostly because I threw great block quotes at you and I am now running away to let you parse and puzzle them. History, class, cultural subtleties – I have so painfully little knowledge with which to discuss these novels with you at the level of attention they deserve. But I see them, full of Girlhood, and I let you work out how they should best be seen among the crowd of other works.
+
Questions for the text:
1. What on earth is The Tale of Genji doing on this list? How can it be justified as Literature of the Girl? You agree there are reasons though, yes? Or no. State your case.
2. Discuss the use of liminal settings in both the Wakamurasaki chapter of The Tale, and The Voyage Out. Can you feel the ground beneath your feet as you read? What gives these places a certain hollowness (if indeed you believe there to be hollowness?)
3. Is the above metaphor for marriage (as a sentence to execution) itself a cliché? What would you like to say about marriage for girls and what it does to them, then? Something more incisive, I’d hope. How about give us something furiously detailed, based on historical instances, and how that compares to choice fictional representations in the writings of female authors, if you feel so qualified.
4. Superficialities: clothing, pets/affectations, surfaces, accomplishments made to be displayed (piano-playing, etc) – what do you have to say about how these perform in both texts? Go on, be bold.
Write your essay in wobbly realism/stream-of-consciousness or in a crisp text with a focus on the concrete and that which is mostly culturally lost to us.