Writing Like a Woman: Poetry, Domesticity, and the Feminine Self
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, James Madison University
At a tea party in January 1930, the critic Pramatha Chaudhuri complained that Bengali women authors simply mimicked the style of male writers and lacked a genuinely feminine voice. He discussed the subject with the writer Radharani Devi who disputed his claim; but he remained skeptical. Unable to persuade him, Radharani decided to give Chaudhuri his ask--a feminine voice. Embarking upon a literary experiment, she adopted the nom de plume “Aparajita Devi” and started writing poetry in a markedly “feminine” style about women’s experience of everyday domestic life. Aparajita’s poems were wildly popular!
Examining a set of Aparajita Devi’s poems, my presentation addresses the idea of the authentically feminine: Is it the voice, the diction, or the content that makes Aparajita’s poems “womanly”? I examine how Radharani Devi had deliberated on Chaudhuri’s assertion about the absence of an “authentic” women’s voice in literature and had supplied it, bringing out through the poems the breadth and vitality of the prosaic, everyday womanhood of Bengal. Finally, I examine how Radharani Devi’s poetic ventriloquism had complicated the question of women’s writing by unveiling that the “authentically feminine” voice that the critics demanded was itself no more than a literary persona to be adopted or set aside.