David and Goliath Battle and ‘#Me Too Movement’

Dr Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal

History of the homo sapiens has evolved a lot over a period of time. Right from the inventions of fire and
wheel in the earlier stages of life to the printing of rare manuscripts during the Renaissance and Internet during the
Postindustrial society, humans have seen many revolutions where several stratified hierarchies have been
dismantled. The earlier feudal control of the Church on the Individual loosened during the Renaissance with the
emergence of new science and knowledge led by the likes of Newton, Descartes and Copernicus etc. Socratic
inquisitions have been challenging the sickening orthodoxies since the days of yore. Political and philosophical
history of the West is stuffed with the ideals of liberty, equality and justice. A host of institutions are democratized
and the subaltern people on the periphery have begun to resist the power centres of the elite.

Despite all these ideological revolutions, approaches of men towards women haven’t altered. Since the
ages, man has commodified woman. Holding the reins of authority, man has captured her mind, heart and body .
Literature is filled with the instances of her subjugation by him. He is the norm; she is the derided other. Social
institutions have been framed to make her obey the patriarchy. Any resistance to set norms of phallocentric social
structure are scoffed at, ridiculed and discredited. Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, reflects the ethos of the age in
questioning Gertrude for trespassing the morals: “Rebellious hell,/ If thou canst mutine in a matron's bones/, To
flaming youth let virtue be as wax,/ And melt in her own fire.” Hamlet’s perpetual insanity, though called by some
scholars to be feigned madness and an offshoot of perennial hankering after endless mazes of thought by others, may
have its origin in his fixed ideas about marriage and widowhood being shattered by the second marriage of the
mother with the uncle. The conventionally misogynist mindset of Hamlet, nurtured on the ideals about woman’s
chastity, is derailed when the mother breaks the chains. He begins to accuse all women of the world of adultery:
“Frailty, thy name is woman.”

17th metaphysical poet John Donne displays this sneeringly contemptuous approach towards women in ‘Go
and Catch a Failing Star’: “No where/ Lives a woman true, and fair.” In another of his poem ‘A Valediction
Forbidding Mourning’, employing the far-fetched compass imagery for which he was severely bashed by Dr
Johnson, he is asking his partner to be the ‘fixed foot’ and to sit in the centre ‘when the other far doth roam’. She is
called ‘the other foot’ that ‘leans and hearkens after it (the moving needle)’. Why can’t she travel? Why does the
man want her to be fixed? Does he consider her to be his property? This misogyny is in line with Milton’s sermon
dictating that ‘their sex not equal seemed’. Positing on this sinister methodology of marginalizing and othering of
the women, the great Messiah pronounces: “He for God only, she for God in him.” Despite all this, Wordsworth is
able to sing panegyric in the honour of the great poet: “Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:/Pure as the
naked heavens, majestic, free”. The women issue is further complicated when we realize that all these writers had
otherwise been great advocates of human independence and championed the ideals of resistance to dictatorial
authority. Milton’s otherwise liberal leanings are discernible in his eulogy ‘of man’s first disobedience’ in the very
first line of Paradise Lost. These are not the isolated references from the literary history. As part of this literary
pogrom, she is dehumanized and made an obedient robot, who cannot argue, speak, think and raise questions
independently. Woman is supposed to obey, serve and also deify the man. She is recognized only as a daughter,
mother or wife. This fixed and other foot is disallowed untrammeled individualism.

While the male writers have endeavoured to subjugate her through the propagation of her duties, certain
female counterparts are holding the cudgels of resistance. Virginia Woolf talks of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister
who could not get the opportunity like her brother: “Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney
Lee’s ‘Life of the Poet’. She died young— alas, she never wrote a word…. She lives in you and in me, and in many
other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed…. they
need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.”
 In this conflicting situation, man tries to argue that these gender roles are natural and divinely ordained.
Having supreme control over institutions, he begins moulding the public opinion including that of the women itself
through ‘manufacturing consent’ around the ideals of chastity, morality, ethics, religion and public order. At this
point, she must keep track of the suggestions made by Simone de Beauvoir : “One is not born, but rather becomes,
a woman.”

The current ‘#Me too Movement’ may be a sort of resistance against the male hegemony. This movement
is gearing up women to speak against their physical harassment by men. Earlier, women did not speak out against
chauvinistic exploitation of their honour by men. Ordinary, unknown, common and weaker women have come out
of their shells to divulge the advances on them by the influential bigwigs of bollywood , media, government,
bureaucracy and academics. It is a David versus Goliath battle, where the assaulted victim is facing the gigantically
draconian might of the system.

Dr Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal is Associate Professor of English at Feroze Gandhi College, Rae Bareli.