A Decade Later

The Female Mirage


"It is possible to die." These words kept playing in my head last night, after watching 'The Hours', for the nth time. I know what those words mean, I have felt them many times before in my life. But when Virginia Woolf (in the movie, played by Nicole Kidman) utters those words to herself, she doesn't realise that she is talking about more than the dying of a body. I have read 'Mrs Dalloway', 'To the Lighthouse', and 'A Room of One's Own'. As a literature student, I know where she stands, much seperated from Joyce, even though both were writing in the same stream-of-consciousness style. She was part of the Bloomsbury school in England. Why is that she chose to die, when Joyce or Proust didn't? She was as much as an intellectual as the rest of them on the literary scene in London, but she always felt much more unappreciated than the others. Because she was a woman, and though she chose to balance her career and popularity with her marriage, just as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton did, one day she couldn't keep up with the balls in the air, and death seemed like the only solution.
Maybe a marriage does do that to women. The man continues living two seperate lives, but the woman keeps feeling guilty. Sometimes it is because she is not able to fulfill her duty as a wife, and sometimes it's because she is not doing enough justice to herself.
Long before I saw this movie, I too fantasised of walking into a deep green lake, so much so that this fantasy became so real that everytime I wanted to escape, I would imagine the cool water rising above my head.
The suffocation and guilt a woman experiences is nothing new. The modern woman knows it much better than her Victorian counterpart, because her roles now are not that clearly defined, as compared to when they were restricted to the parlor, the piano, or the kitchen.
The answers are not easy. It will come only once the years of ancestral conditioning are erased, and women try not to ape men. It will come when women start seeing themselves as humans first, and women later. One must be proud to be a woman, but one must not forget that it comes later, only after they realise what they owe to themselves without fear, guilt or shame.
It is possible to die, but the death must be of the struggle that women impose upon themselves. It is easier to breathe free when women realise that the cage they see is only an illusion.
It is there because years ago, it was built for their ancestors, and it has left its mark on the silent soil. The cage doesn't exist anymore. It is possible to die, but dear Virginia, it is also possible to live...