Shauna Singh Baldwin’s ‘What the Body Remembers’, and Moliere’s ‘The School for Wives’

                 As the explorer-adventurer Allen Quatermain begins his search for the treasures held within the mysterious, purportedly unattainable King Solomon’s Mines (in the book of the same name, by Sir H. Rider Haggard –jokes about his name later), he exerts himself over a landscape akin to a map drawn upon a woman’s body.
 

                 The mountains he crosses are Sheba’s breasts, a river leads down her torso, and deep in the canyon between her legs lies the mine whose depths contain vast hoards of inconceivable diamonds men have only heard about and not seen, and that they will kill for.
 

                 Apart from the fertile, lush, feminine landscape that the men explore, women are practically absent, with the exception of only 2 stereotypes - Gagool (an old crone), and Foulata (a beautiful African maiden the white explorers rescue from ending up as a human sacrifice).

                 The one is shriveled up and wise, and therefore neither a temptation nor a threat (since she is not 'wise' in the knowledge of Western science/ the arts, that is). The latter is the white male fantasy of an exotic, attractive, adoring, feminine slave woman who dies for love. Just to clarify, Foulata’s love is made out to be a crush she secretly nurses for her male ‘savior’ who acknowledges her, but doesn’t consider her worth his ‘attention’ because she is not his equal in any way.

                 And because both women do not fall within the explorers’ realm of what constitutes a worthy love interest or more importantly, a friend (for after all, friendships are forged between equals), neither woman is worthy of the attention of the male characters in ‘King Solomon’s Mines’.

             
                  It appears, the men choose to ignore even what might be available to them (i.e. - courtship and marriage in England), in favor of having a merry boy’s club jaunt in forbidden territory. Quatermain is relieved to observe, “I can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole history.”

                  The reason why I mention ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ is because it reminded me of female silences, in a play and a novel I recently enjoyed – Moliere’s ‘The School for Wives’ (1662), and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s ‘What the Body Remembers’ (1999). Women play central roles in both texts, with each writer illustrating their tenuous existences within the systems they are born into. They are present physically, yet are overlooked, spoken for, saved, judged, decided for, by the men who 'own' them. To be honest, they face many challenges still faced by women in almost all cultures whose theories defend sexual equality while practice shows otherwise.

                  Set in 17^th century Europe, ‘The School for Wives’ centers around a 16 year old motherless child (Agnes), whose 43 year old guardian Arnolphe has paid for her education (or to be specific, for the lack of it, because educated women have opinions, and men do not want to be bothered with answering these opinions). So Agnes has been suitably raised in a convent since the age of 4, and Arnolphe gleefully believes she is entirely innocent of the carnal knowledge of the written word. He anticipates the pleasure of tutoring his future wife to perform just as he means her to, and to live only by his approval.

                 ‘What the Body Remembers’ is set between the 1880’s and 1947, when British India was transformed into the countries of India and Pakistan (later to be split into Bangladesh in the 1960s). The turbulent birth of 2 nations, accompanied by much contractual pain and bloodshed on either side of the Radcliffe Line, is the backdrop against which we witness the maturation of Roop, a young motherless Sikh woman, who learns to navigate her life through dint of hard experience, and to lead.  

                 The difference between Roop and Agnes are their existences in the worlds of Realism and Satire.

                 Beautiful, partially deaf, 16 year old Roop becomes the second wife of a high-ranking land-owning Sardar in his 40s, simply because she wants “pretty clothes and lots of servants”. She realizes that this strategy is not easy to live with when it is clear that the Bari-Sardarni (the Sardar’s first wife who has been unable to conceive) has complied with her husband’s second marriage only with the intent of using Roop as a baby-producing machine. Roop is forced to give up her daughter first, and then her son, to Satya.

                  Despite Satya’s attempts to wreck her husband’s second marriage, however, Roop endures, using her native intelligence and acquiescent demeanor as self-protection. In this game whose rules have been written by patriarchal culture, Roop ultimately wins the Sardar’s preference by fulfilling her expected role – that of producing 2 sons and a daughter to ensure the Sardar’s lineage, while being a dutiful, quiet, wife.

                  Satya, on the other hand, prefers death to dishonor, and deliberately contracts tuberculosis, passing on quickly. She makes her choice in a system that expects her to live according to its definition of womanhood. Roop lives on, surviving the birth of 2 nations, to provide hope to an Oxford-educated Sardar, displaced from Lahore to Delhi, in a new, bruised, but optimistic India.

                  Interestingly, the name ‘Roop’ means physical beauty, while ‘Satya’ is truth, both meanings exemplified by the 2 women.

                 Roop periodically remember’s her father’s words as she leaves for her new home, after her marriage ceremony – “Above all, give no trouble.” Giving no trouble – in other words, not perpuating willful dialogues with one’s husband and challenging him – ensures her survival, ironically. Roop notes that beauty – charming smiles, soft words, and an attractively dressed body, are pleasing to her husband. In fact, one of her most common utterances to him is, “I don’t know”, spoken wide-eyed, head slightly bent in deference, with a shy glance at his face, because she knows it pleases him to tutor her and to lead.

                  She understands that her husband’s nightly visits are not about her pleasure, but his. That the strategy of ensuring her own survival through serving him will work, while communicating in a primal, subtle, silent exchange outside the bounds of patriarchal verbal discourse. That her partial deafness, once seen as a handicap to be kept a secret from all, has actually been her strength all along, training her in non-verbal self—defense.

                   Satya, on the other hand, fights being cast aside for a second wife by shrieking, protesting, questioning, and accusing in the only language she has consciously accepted as her own because it is that patriarchal language that defined and approved of her image as a strong, courageous, and intelligent high-born Sardarni. One wonders why Satya doesn’t realize that she would never win an argument in a language that lent her only the power she did not ask for? Truth spoken from a woman’s lips is never acknowledged in a marketplace of constructs. But then again, 'satya' has been just that for time immemorial.

                   Satya is the opposite of Roop, and is contemptuous of this 16 year old uncultured low-born village girl (not even from an old Sikh family like hers) who has unconsciously nudged her from her prime position. She hurts more to think that her husband would choose such a woman, after having known her. What a contrast. What an insult.

                    In an affirmation of Keats' words - “Beauty is truth, truth beauty..” - upon Satya’s death, Roop comes into her own, merging her beauty with the truth of Satya’s thought. She uses her beauty and her silence as tools not just to shield herself, but going forward, to instill courage and a sense of purpose in her weary husband, who has lost all his material wealth during the Partition, and is in danger of losing his sense of self. Roop becomes a version of Satya…a reflection of India itself, beautiful and truthful, as against the rather nebulous beauty and truth of the neighboring self-righteous, self-absorbed, and conceited Pakistan (‘the land that is pure’, ironically).

                     In ‘The School for Wives’, Agnes (whose name means ‘pure’ or ‘holy’) similarly reserves her passionate speech only for the young Horatio, whom fate introduces her to, despite her living in Arnolphe’s gilded cage. Agnes allows emotion to guide her dialogue with Horatio, and discovers that this forbidden passion allows her to operate outside Arnolphe’s semantic realm.

                     Arnolphe has absolutely no clue about the depth of emotions Agnes is capable of precisely because of his expectation that she do or speak only as he wishes. He pays no heed to her utterances because he thinks they do not matter. Needless to say, her silences prolong his ignorance. Arnolphe is cuckolded by fate at the end of the play, when his plan to punish Agnes by marrying her off to an unknown is foiled. Ultimately, Agnes chooses approval over obedience and happily awaits her marriage to Horatio.

                     Rider Haggard’s Gagool and Foulata, Singh Baldwin’s Roop and Satya, and Moliere’s Agnes are all absences in patriarchal systems because they have not written their own selves into power. In other words, their narratives have not been heard and assimilated in the palimpsest of male or ‘written’ authorship in their respective times and cultures.

                    The 2 women who use patriarchal discourse to assert their identities and independence – Gagool and Satya – resort to that bastion of female defiance (defined as ‘hysteria’ by patriarchal psychology), and meet violent ends. Gagool is crushed by an enormous boulder, while Satya chooses a kind of slow but certain death via degeneration.

                     Agnes and Roop, on the other hand, appear guileless, but in fact turn out to be far more effective in furthering their own interests by using their their silences to manipulate the system…they don’t protest their limits but instead decide to strategically extend their domain. Agnes is aided by chance, while Roop (perhaps unwittingly) uses Satya as an effective contrast (as with Jane Eyre and Rochester’s first wife, who has been imprisoned as the 'madwoman in the attic').

                     Agnes and Roop are not just manipulating the system though. They actively create their oral narratives (hence all the more difficult to pin and remove) and bend with the times – the constantly evolving definition of what constitutes their ‘homes’, and in Roop’s case, ‘country’ even. Singh Baldwin, while contrasting the tension from the forces between Roop and Satya – beauty and truth – also paints the anxiety that their Sardar must face as a subaltern (an Oxonian engineer, with his world of Tuesday lunch clubs, valets, motorcars, travel, international objets d’arts notwithstanding) in the face of the Empire that executes a poor exit strategy, ignoring minorities altogether during the Partition.

                     So what does the body remember eventually? The ability to bounce back and to rebuild, apparently, despite any amount of turbulence and uncertainty. To bend without breaking. The collective memory of suffering and the resulting fortitude. Not what is written on paper, by the victors, but more importantly, in the collective consciousness, to be passed on orally between women, from mothers to children, and so on…stories where the beauty of truth instructs the listener to learn from changing times.