Is Romance Injurious to Feminism?
Feminism is a source of strength for many progressive males and females whereas the same concept is a target of much scorn to the regressive individuals. Surely, I cannot call myself a hardcore feminist as I seriously pride myself on being too feminine and tender, but does it imply that feminism and femininity are two different things? While feminism is more of a socio-political and economic revolution where the women came together to form movements that established political, personal, social, and economic rights and equality; femininity is mainly a quality or trait associated with womanly characteristics like docility, elegance, tenderness, frailty and other soft qualities.
It is a common (mis)concept that feminists are mostly very strong, robust and masculine type females. If this is the case then what do we call these famous literary personalities like Mary Shelley, Sylvia Plath and Amrita Pritam. These three females who are like torchbearers of feminism in literature were actually great victims of love and romance. Their respective partners or lovers were the cause of their doom — is that so?
Love That Killed Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was married to Ted Hughes and their romance started off as nothing less than something right out of a fairytale. The two are renowned poets of English literature and one can only imagine the perfection of their romance by reading their eloquent pieces. What started off as a dream come true ended into a nightmare with Plath falling into the quagmire of giving birth to children one after another an act she dreaded right after her marriage as Sylvia Plath felt that childbirth and child rearing will halt her writing; she got busy running the household at the cost of risking her creativity and what did she get in return — her early childhood was marred by the presence of a patriarchal father that was more or less the cause of a history of depression and self-harm; her condition worsened conversely when Hughes left her for another woman.
Even though Plath did gift us with intense and marvelous pieces in her short life. Too young to die, all the lovers of literature abhor the vacuum left by her suicide at the tender of 30, had she lived longer, she would have taken her readers to a different plane altogether. Never mind, what’s done is done, her suicide or death is something that fills most of the feminists with rage and they get all the right reasons to loathe and despise men, Sylvia Plath oozed feminism in all her writings, she was a feminist after all yet it was her loving heart that doomed her or maybe we owe it to her mental condition that didn’t receive the required attention she needed at that time.
Mary Shelley and Her Undying Love
Mary Shelley and P. B. Shelley, a love affair filled with scandals, heartbreak, tragedy and undying romance. Percy got romantically involved with Mary when he was already married with a kid, plus Mary was five years his junior and she was only sixteen when the two eloped. Percy had a habit of writing journals wherein Mary also contributed from time to time, and in this way not only were their bodies entwined with each other in the physical world, but their writings also merged, overlapped and entwined into one esoteric whole. The two lived for two years without marriage as they were of the opinion that they did not need a legal parchment or social approval to be together, theirs was a union free of such dogmatic norms. But with turns of events, they finally got married.
Their love life was not very smooth and the romantic arena was no bed of roses, Shelley was devastated as a woman with a fatal miscarriage and two premature babies that died months after birth; luckily her fourth child survived. If this was not enough, she became a widow at the of 24 when P. B. Shelley died from drowning.
Mary was a woman of strong will, she didn’t give up so soon, not only did she publish her husband’s works posthumously, but she also published a number of novels making her one of the earliest science-fiction writers. Mary Shelley is synonymous with her Gothic novel Frankenstein and other popular novels. Despite a tumultuous life, and a short-lived love, Shelley spent her entire life editing, publishing and spreading her late husband’s work.
This is feminism in the garb of femininity for sure.
These women make me feel that their feminism sprouted only after they came in contact with their men. Their love life may have been bitter or sweet, dark or happy, intense or romantic but their love acted as a catalyst in their lives. These men acted as their driving force and vice-versa.
The Skeleton (Pinjar) of Amrita Pritam’s Romance
The story of Amrita Pritam is no different. All her life she openly professed her love for the famous poet and songwriter Sahir Ludhianvi, and even though he never ever openly confessed of their love in public but her reflection was more than evident in each of his writings or so the lovelorn poetess felt. She dedicated all her awards to him and all her life she yearned for his nearness but Sahir was driven by grief, dejection, pessimism, and pain — he wrote of human oppression and persecution of the poor.
Amrita loved Sahir while she was married to Pritam Singh, she remained true to Sahir even after separation from her husband, and there was no one in her life even after the death of Sahir Ludhianvi. Amrita belonged to Sahir till her last breath. Her genre of writing is Romantic-Progressivism, and it is in her novel, Pinjar, one can see the strength of a suppressed woman. Verily, it is one of her most remarkable pieces of art.
All these literary stalwarts have feminism spread all over their works yet when one looks at their personal life, it seems so strange how come they doggedly pursued just one man and dedicated their entire life yearning, pining, craving or simply obsessing over him. This particular trait highlights the intensity of their passion, they dogged one man because to them it is in that particular individual all their inspiration, motivation, creativity and eloquence originated and culminated, their lover was their beginning and end, standard and extreme, life and nemesis — love is not love that doesn’t make you burn every second of your life. To love is to annihilate your very self and rotate around the light of your love the way a moth circles fire and finally extinguishes itself in the same fire when it can’t take the warmth and light of the fire anymore; the fire consumes the moth and the two then extinguish as an indistinguishable whole before the break of dawn.
To love is to die many deaths in just one life. Love does not die when life ends, love is an immortal entity that resides in one’s soul, in our consciousness, in our dream and wakefulness, in feminism and femininity, it engulfs us like the fifth element — the ether. Love a writer if you want to achieve immortality, this way long after you are gone, you will live, shine and breathe in their writing. Hughes, Percy and Sahir are alive in the writings of Sylvia Plath, Mary Shelley and Amrita Pritam, and every time one talks about these towering males in the field of literature, these women are bound to come up.
Therefore, when two artists unite, there are not just fireworks and sparks, a whole universe is formed; it is more of a stellar collision — the coming together of two stars. When two like-minded intense individuals submerge into one another — the result is a supernova explosion — the rise of a new world, new order and a whole new system.
