Room and Roots: A Transcultural Feminist Reading of Virginia Woolf and Selina Hossain

Abstract

This present study offers a transcultural feminist reading of Virginia Woolf and Selina Hossain, exploring how both the female authors articulate feminine subjectivity through the entwined concepts of space, identity and individuality beyond set patriarchal norms and women’s preference in thwarting societal impediments. “Using “Écriture feminine”, Selina Hossain critiques patriarchal “spider-web”, and celebrates female solidarity as well as resilience in a male-dominated society highlighting the urgency for economic freedom, and inner-psychological strength. Her female characters exhibit various forms of agency as well as strong defiance against all kind of oppression. Virginia Woolf emphasizes women empowerment, women’s self-actualization dismantling male-dominated patriarchal restrictions on female creativity. Hossain’s feminism highlights postcolonial, subaltern realities while Virginia Woolf’s feminism centers on intellectual and economic independence. Woolf belongs to First World Modernist era while Hossain’s world is Third World, Postcolonial era.  Nature of oppression is different in these two worlds. Hossian’s women had to fight against social injustice, patriarchal oppressions, class conflict and gender oppression. Woolf’s ladies had to fight for intellectual independence, financial freedom and creative opportunity. Selina Hossain through her writing, wanted to renew the tradition to give voice to her marginalized female characters.  Virginia Woolf aimed to build a new sentence, a new tradition for female writers that is totally different from patriarchal tradition: “The androgynous mind”. She proposed psychological and creative freedom of female authors. Female authors should avoid masculine narrative and create new female literary heritage and a new robust female lineage.