Celebrating the Eternal Woman...

Dr. Dasan delivered the key note address on “Celebrating the Eternal Woman:  A Note on the Heroism of the Feminine Psyche” at the National Seminar on Women’s Writing in English, held at St.Mary’s College, on 10 January 2014.

Excerpts from his address:

This keynote address aims at the figural portrayal of the female self. While attempting to highlight the contrasting perceptions between the ‘female self’ as a biological and natural construct and ‘the woman’ as a social construct, it underscores that ultimately it is the paradoxical differences in gender sexuality, differences which simultaneously reiterate the beauty and richness of the biological complementarity ingrained in the very act of the creation of man and woman, which prevail in terms of true humanity. I am one of those who subscribe to the view that the social construct of woman, woman as objectified Other, ‘reified as a sexual and linguistic commodity fixed, written about and traded among men’ by the metaphysical Self, ought to be dismantled and deconstructed, and the natural construct of the female self, attuned to the biological and the eternal feminine, should prevail as a liberating force.

The figuration of the female self implied in the title of this keynote address comes from varied interstitial sources. Though the inspiration for the title as ‘Celebrating the Eternal Woman…” comes partly from Goethe’s Faust  wherein he speaks of ‘the eternal feminine’ taking Faust closer to heaven, a few other cross-disciplinary source-texts such as John Keats’ poem, “Ode to Psyche” which is a fine song-tribute to the female self associated with fertility and creativity, Taoist principles of masculine Yin (animus) and female Yang (anima) counterbalancing the outer world with the inner world, Carl Jung’s ‘Gnosis on Depth Psychology’, Toni Wolff’s Structural Forms of Feminine Psyche, (1951) – Foursome Feminine Archetypes (queen, mother, wise woman, and lover/Eros) in contrast with the Four Masculine Archetypes (king/leader, warrior, magician/logos, and lover) and Helene Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) – l’ecriture feminine ‘write yourself’ / ‘the female body must be heard so as to change the world’ / woman as medusa exploring her body as a ‘limitless country’/ ‘feminine writing originating from the body’ have also contributed to ‘the figuring of the feminine’ implied in the title. There are other texts such as Mary’s song, The Magnificat’ proclaiming the eternal feminine as an agency nourishing new life, ‘Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988), as a quest for female empowerment education against the enforced silence of women, women treated like domestic cattle yoking to masculine owners, Valmiki’s ‘Ramayana’, Manmohan Singh’s ‘Sarus Crane’ and Mahaswetha Devi’s ‘Breast Stories’ which have made their impact in the musings reflected here.

Defining the Female Self: to be contd…