Woolf lives on in Desai's fiction

A few months ago, in a postcolonial literature class, we read Anita Desai's book Fasting, Feasting, a contemporary fiction set in liberated India. Desai divides her story among two protagonists, or, I would like to argue, between the heroine and her foil: Uma and her brother Arun. Like many post-colonial Indian tales, the sister experiences an unfulfilled life of subordination while the (often ungrateful) brother experiences privilege in abundance. Fasting, feasting. (Though, of course, Desai divides these binaries not-so-neatly, and not without ironies.) It occurred to me while reading the novel that, whether Desai intended the correlation or not, her fiction almost exactly mirrors Virginia Woolf's essay "Shakespeare's Sister."

Uma, like Woolf's imagined Judith, endures of life of unfulfilled potential; her life amounts to a story left untold, the "book that isn't there," according to Woolf. Deprived of education, limited to household duties, used as a pawn for socially profitable marriages, both females experience oppression. Adding insult to injury, her brother Arun, like Judith's William the famed, enjoys the privileges of education and the veritable guarantee of a profitable career. Uma, perpetually trapped, can only imagine the impossibilities: "A career. Leaving home. Living alone . . . Sometimes, miraculously, they sprouted from an idea: run away, escape . . . What was a career? She had no idea" (131).

I appreciate most that Desai, following Woolf's recommendation, allows her protagonist to find solace in writing and reading literature. Although Uma never experiences the complete liberty of her own space - the "room of one's own" that Woolf requires for writing - but she does escape through poetry. Writes Desai, "But she will read a poem or two and find the pleasure they deny her" (135).

I find it fascinating that early feminist writers like Woolf encouraged women to claim literary territory for themselves. With all this talk of the male-dominated, patriarchal literary tradition, some extreme feminists seem to call for a complete abandonment, a sabotage of sorts. I find it much more dignified that writers like Woolf - and descendants like Desai - carve out territory for the gender, claiming it, and insisting to write it. It seems like a progressive definition for them, literature, and rather than subvert the entire thing, they write into the future, affecting a present.