Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 2, August 2004

Special Issue: Jacques Derrida’s Indian Philosophical Subtext

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Grace, Daphne, The Woman in the Muslin Mask: Veiling and Identity in Postcolonial Literature, London: Pluto Press, 2004, 259pp, ISBN 0-7453-2004-X, Hardback price: £ Paperback price £

Reviewed by

Dimple Godiwala

St John’s College, York. University of Leeds

 

The title of Daphne Grace’s book, The Woman in the Muslin Mask, is inspired by Alexander Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask. The comparison may seem ‘obvious’ to western readers: just as the iron mask is a punishment, impossible to remove even as it denies the wearer an identity, western commentators, especially feminists with a ‘social mission’, have long seen the veil as emblematic of Islamic oppression which denies identity and agency to their women.

 

It is Grace’s stated aim to reveal the use of the veil as a far more complex phenomenon than the symbolic oppressive accorded it by eurocentric observers. She firstly reveals that the origins of veiling are not Islamic as popularly supposed, but derive from cultures which predate both, Christianity and Islam. In unveiling, as it were, the myth of the veil, Grace reminds us that to understand the practice of veiling one has to take into account not only the geographical region it is practised in but political, social and religious factors as well.

 

This fascinating study, obviously targeted at western readers, reveals the Islamic veil as often more liberating than pre-feminist western practices. Grace compares the twentieth century western feminist need to find a female space of their own (as endorsed by Virginia Woolf, for example) to the Islamic harems which provide their women this very space which was lacking in the West for a female consolidation of identity. In fact, women within harems in the Ottoman Empire had more rights and enjoyed greater freedoms than married women in Europe, thereby establishing that the veil gave them the agency western women have fought for in the twentieth century. Grace opines that autonomy and the need for freedom from male texts and male spaces which male-ordered society has foisted upon women is a constant refrain within Euro-American feminism, whereas the Islamic veiled woman’s society has, since long, constructed for her this intimate female/ feminine locus which western woman lacks. Grace further establishes that the veil is often used as a cosmetic aid and a fashion device which makes it erotic to the wearer. Memoirs such as those of Leyla Saz Hanimefendi (1922) document the fact that the veil was in fact subject to design and fashion as it matched the garments being worn and was often made of exquisite fabrics with different styles for the day and evening. Alev Lytle Croutier’s 1989 account reveals the etiquette of veiling: the veil, itself translucent and tantalisingly revealing the facial features of the wearer is, in itself, a signifier of the harem, the sanctuary of women, which when worn, signified the sacramental closed doors of the space of woman which no man dare invade.

 

The eastern documentation of the uses of the veil throw into relief the contemporary western attitudes to the veil which, although mouthed primarily by western feminists, arise from their location in western patriarchy, whose notion of ‘woman’ as a site of ‘lack’ is one of space denied. Grace ‘exposes middle-class “white” European attitudes, fears, and bigotry otherwise hidden behind the mask of English sobriety’ by revealing stereotypes of the veiled woman which have existed in the European imagination (p. 37). An important observation made by Grace is that woman has always been regarded as ‘dangerous and corruptive within western religious, social and medical discourses […] as dangerous to the stability of society, that is to say male homosocial society, in discourses ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis, to Islam, to Christianity to the Greek Apollonian/ Aristotelian ideal of civilisation.’ (p. 39). In linking the bias underlying the Christian west towards their own as well as Other women, Grace reveals that the exoticization and fetishization of the veiled woman is simultaneous with their stereotyping as degraded and backward by western ‘mass media and popular culture […] as well as academia.’ (pp. 37-39). Contrasting western male 19th century writers such as Richard Burton – c. 1885 – who fetishized the oriental woman, with female writers such as Lady Montagu – c. 1716 – Grace reveals that the western woman saw veiled eastern women as ultimately freer than herself, and possessed of a power and agency that the western woman did not have access to. Lady Montagu in fact went about veiled in a yashmak when in Turkey, as ‘the liberty offered by the veil constituted freedom of movement, sexual freedom and economic independence’, all of which was denied to most European women. (p.41).

 

The major part of Grace’s book is devoted to the examination and analysis of the veil as symbol and metaphor combined with attitudes to the practice of veiling in little known and some major literary texts of the west as well as the Middle East, Egypt and India. She starts by looking at Oscar Wilde’s Salomé in which the mask of makeup as well as the mask itself are represented as Wildean symbols of decadence, but can be read, in the Freudian sense, as masks for death. Thus is the Oriental Other stereotyped as dangerous, seductive and erotic by western orientalists, which in Wilde becomes a metaphor for the dark side of every human being, ‘a mirror in which everyone could see himself’. (Wilde). The veil in Wilde is Art and Artifice, the illusion of truth and beauty. In Rudyard Kipling and James Buchanan the veil typically becomes a trope for the west’s conception of the eastern as savage and mysterious. (see Edward Said’s Orientalism). Whilst western texts portray the eastern as dangerous and savage, often with regard to what is cited as the barbaric and primitive practice of veiling, the literatures of the Middle Eastern are ‘texts that highlight the situation of women within nationalist struggle against British rule as well as within contemporary patriarchal social structures’ (p.68). Here, taking the veil-as-choice becomes a trope for nationalism and class status. Feminism, nationalism and veiling are inter-linked in Egyptian literature as the veil becomes a key symbol in the struggle for female emancipation. (p.74). This is traced in the writing of Ahdat Soueif, Naquib Mahfouz and Nawal El Saadawi.

 

The religious nature of veiling in the Arab world and the themes of free choice in marriage and the need for an equality of the sexes are frequent in Middle Eastern fiction. Here, the veil acquires a polarised nature – as an informed choice or an oppressive. In Maghrebian literature (which comes under the category of Francophone literature) the concept of veiling is a practical one. However in Assia Djebar and Ben Jalloun the veil is more metaphoric and takes its significance from the forced un-veiling of the Algerians by the colonising French.

 

Grace further discusses the veil as a symbol of cultures which need to reinforce a rigid obedience to male authority. In this context the practice is discussed in the context of India, where she problematically conflates Muslim and Hindu practices of veiling. Whilst she distinguishes between fitna and dharma (p.160) she does not distinguish the different natures of the practice. She refers to the zenana (harem) as the essential space of Indian femininity when in practice, in Hindu households there is no harem space. In India, the traditional Hindu woman’s status is very like the pre-feminist western woman’s status, where she has no room of her own. The Hindu woman’s ghunghat, with which she shields her face whilst in the company of elders and men, is a public display of subservience, a practice which renders her, like her early Western counterpart, invisible, silent and inferior with no room of her own.

 

The twentieth century woman, whether an occupant of western or some eastern cultures, has, to some degree, rebelled against the fact of silencing and invisibility by her respective patriarchy. The Hindu woman’s status in traditional and rural households is very similar to that of the pre-feminist western woman who was denied a physical, intellectual and moral space of her own. In this regard it is the veiled woman of ancient and contemporary Islamic cultures who emerges the winner: she has always had a space of her own.

 

The veil, enforced strictly and punitively in Saudi Arabia, is regarded as oppressive even by Grace in her otherwise excellent book even as she endorses the veil as a symbol of freedom in some Islamic cultures. Indeed it is seen as a positive trope if it is practiced as a choice of nationalists or those who wish to reinforce their religious roots as in diaspora. She reads it as actually more liberating, as in those cultures in which a veiled woman has freedoms not possessed by the predecessors of the contemporary western feminists. Yet, the latter, instead of acknowledging the greater freedom accorded to some eastern women, attempt to ‘lift the veil and “liberate” oriental [sic] woman [which] can be seen as part of the orientalist obsession with “othering” the eastern’. (p.207).

 

In closing it may be said that it may not be enough to survey a woman’s practice such as veiling in indigenous literatures. Whilst the veil, when practiced as choice, as a nationalist trope or a signifier of private women’s space may be freely recorded in eastern women’s writings, the ruling powers of oppressive patriarchies may not permit the documentation of women’s oppression even in literature. In order to have more authority in writing of the practice of veiling, a study such as this necessitates more documentation, drawn perhaps from interviews of practising groups of women in the countries and cultures surveyed. However, Grace’s title does establish that it is literature that she is surveying for representations of veiling, and for the major part of the book she does just that. Grace’s conclusion is weakly drawn up as it may serve to support the view of veiling as an oppressive. In conclusion, she calls veiling a ‘paradox’ when really the veil is not a paradox in itself at all, but subject to the interpretation of the practice in a given culture. Certain time periods and cultures in which veiling was, and is, practiced, served to offer its women greater freedoms. Just as it allowed a pre-modern Turkish woman to be ‘liberated’, modern-day Saudi Arabia’s forced punitive practice may well serve to oppress. But in the latter culture it is not the practice of  veiling itself, but the rigidly and violently enforced patriarchal practices within a culture of constant surveillance which serve to control and oppress women and men which is to be condemned; the veil itself may well serve as masquerade and a private space even in these cultures. This is what Daphne Grace fails to point out in this otherwise valuable study of the much misunderstood practice of veiling.